Investigating the moderating effect of self-efficacy on the relationship between ambiguity and role conflict on employees' creativity

Commercial Management Group

Transformation Orientation

Master's Thesis

While in today's changing conditions, organizations need creativity for success, there are a number of job stressors such as ambiguity and role conflict in organizations that have a negative effect on the creativity of employees, but the remarkable thing is that if a person in this situation believes that he is self-efficacious, he can have this effect. Reduce the negative. The aim of this research is to determine the moderating effect of self-efficacy on the relationship between role ambiguity and role conflict on employees' creativity. In this regard, the data of this research were collected through a questionnaire from a sample of 72 employees of Mashhad Electricity Distribution Company's headquarters using a simple random sampling method. To check the construct validity of the measuring instrument, confirmatory factor analysis was used and Cronbach's alpha index was used to measure reliability, and the Cronbach's alpha coefficient was more than 0.70. came Direct hypotheses were examined using structural equations and SMART PLS software, and moderation hypotheses using adjusted multiple regression and SPSS software. The results showed that ambiguity and role conflict have a significant and negative effect on employee creativity, and as a moderating variable, self-efficacy has a significant effect on the relationship between ambiguity and role conflict with employee creativity. puts 

Key words:Role ambiguity, role conflict, creativity, self-efficacy and Mashhad Electric Power Distribution Company

Introduction

Since dynamism and change are the most important features of the environment of today's organizations, the preservation and survival of organizations is once a researcher They can improve themselves along with the economic, political and social changes in the path of development and transformation. The realization of which is a very difficult, delicate and sensitive task and can only be achieved by applying new ideas and accepting and nurturing creative and innovative talents. But there are many factors that affect the creativity of employees (Slater[1], Helt[2] and Slan[3], 2010). One of these cases is stress, which is one of the most acute issues in today's organizations (Nasiri, Panidate and Derakhshan, 2013). Factors that are rooted in the individual differences of people, 2- Factors that are caused by cultural, social and family differences, 3- Factors that are caused by the characteristics of the work environment (cited by Aghaei, Jalali, Hassanzadeh and Aslan, 2019). Personality and demographic characteristics of people are among the most important factors involved in creating individual differences that can affect the way stress is perceived and dealt with. Regarding the relationship between demographic characteristics such as gender, age, marital status, etc., with stress, various studies have been conducted, the results of which indicate that some demographic characteristics have a significant relationship with occupational stress and how stress is experienced. Regarding the second category of factors related to stress, several studies have been conducted, especially the role of changes in the social environment at all levels, including global, national, local, family and individual, in the occurrence of stress has been emphasized. The third category of stressors, which is part of the purpose of this study, are related to the factors related to the job and the work environment. Organizational psychologists have identified the stressors of the work environment, the most important of which are the characteristics of the role (Bamber [6], 2006, quoted by Aghaei and others, 2013). Ross[7] and Altmeyer[8] (1377) also consider ambiguity and role conflict to be one of the most important features of role.

Although everyone is at risk of stress, some people may experience higher stress than others. Therefore, other variables (such as individual differences) should be involved in the relationship between stress and its consequences (Azimi, Salimi and Hajipour, 2013). A group of individual variables that play a role in the relationship between stressors and stress are the beliefs that people have about themselves. Among these beliefs, self-efficacy as a basic component of social-cognitive theory plays a significant role in facing obstacles and troubles (Lu [9], Siu [10] and Cooper, 2008).Self-efficacy is not related to people's skills, but what a person believes he can do under certain conditions. Different people with the same and similar abilities may perform poorly, averagely or well in different situations depending on whether they have low or high efficacy beliefs. Therefore, skills are easily influenced by self-doubt. For this reason, a capable person may not act optimally due to a lack of confidence in his ability and competence (Azeimi et al., 2013).

In this regard, in this chapter, firstly, the statement of the problem, the necessity and importance of conducting research, the goals, hypotheses, the spatial, temporal and thematic realm, and the definitions of key words are discussed, and in the second to fifth chapters, the subject literature, research methodology, and analysis are discussed respectively. Data, discussion and conclusions will be discussed. The rapid global developments in science and technology, industry and management of many successful organizations and companies in the world have led them to direct their goals, tendencies and interests towards the use of creativity (Falah, Budaghi and Delnawaz, 2013). He has suffered and tormented (Hosni, 2004). Ambiguity and role conflict are among the most important stressors that, by putting pressure on people, reduce the level of work energy, weaken task performance and creative tendencies (Babakas[11], Yaos[12] and Asheel[13], 2009). This is while stressors usually do not directly and absolutely lead to stress, but the way people perceive these factors play a major role in creating stress, so individual differences variables may be related to the understanding that more attention should be paid to them in occupational stress research. One of the variables of individual differences is self-efficacy (Lu, Siu and Cooper, 2005). Self-efficacy is a person's belief in their ability to succeed in a particular situation. According to Bandura[14], this belief is the determining factor of how to think, behave and feel (cited by Singh[15] and Gill[16], 2014). That is, a person may perform unsuccessfully despite having the necessary skills to perform an action and despite being good at how to perform that action, due to having weak self-efficacy beliefs (Ganji and Farahani, 2018). People with high self-efficacy reduce their level of psychological stress in stressful situations, but people with low self-efficacy experience high anxiety when faced with threats and expand their inefficiency and see many aspects of the environment as dangerous and threatening, which can cause stress and psychological pressure (Kazemi, 2018). On the other hand, self-efficacy beliefs are among the requirements that are necessary and necessary to have motivation and effort to perform productive activities (Luthans[17] and Stockwick[18] and Breira[19], 2000).

Interviews were held with the employees of the Mashhad Electricity Distribution Company, where it was sometimes observed that some employees do not know exactly their duties, or with requests They face inconsistencies from different people. On the other hand, managers have more expectations from some of their subordinates regarding the improvement of processes, work methods and speed in responding to subordinate units, and part of these results can be realized in the form of creativity and innovation of employees. Therefore, carrying out the present research in order to know the level of efficiency and role ambiguity and conflict, and especially their effect on creativity, can provide the basis for removing the obstacles to creativity from this point of view in the Mashhad Electricity Distribution Company.

1- 3- The necessity and importance of conducting research

Every organization needs different resources to achieve its goals, and without a doubt, the most important resource in every organization is the human resources employed in that organization. Several factors affect the performance of people in the organization, one of the things that strongly affects the organizational behavior of each person is creativity (Y. Dehghani, M. Dehghani and Mazaheri, 2013).