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Managerial Control Stres
Managerial Control Stres
Claes Palm
Organizational stress research has demonstrated the role of employee control in buffering the
impact of work demands, such as time pressure, on stress (Häuser, Mojzisch, Niesel
& Schulz-Hardt, 2010; van der Doef & Maes, 1999). Public service organizations have
increased their management control (Diefenbach, 2009; Hood, 1991). It has further been
suggested that some types of management control come at the expense of employee control
(Karasek & Theorell, 1990). In the context of a public service organization, this study
examines how management control and employee control relate to stress.
Stress is the single most common cause of long term sick leave in Sweden, resulting in high
expenses for the Swedish society (Sverigesradio.se, 2012). Stress is related to, for example,
job dissatisfaction, accidents and absenteeism which lead to high costs for organizations (e.g.,
Cooper & Cartwright, 1984; Ongori & Agolla, 2008).
In the last two-three decades, public organizations have gone through transformations to be
more transparent, installing more auditing, accounting and visualizing technologies.
Employees are more explicitly evaluated for their performance and effectiveness. In other
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words, management control has been intensified in public organizations. These trends have
been called the New Public Management (NPM) (Blomgren, 2007; Hood, 1991; Shore &
Wright, 1999).
Management control can be exercised through a range of various devices and systems,
summarized as ”management control systems” (MCS), which purpose is to ensure that the
employees behave and take decisions in line with the objectives and the overall strategy, or
rather that the deviations from these are kept as low as possible (Anderson & O`Reilley, 1981;
Green & Welsh, 1984; Malmi & Brown, 2008). It has been suggested that the components of
a MCS should be studied as a package, and not in isolation, when examining the relation to
employee behavior. The reason is that the components are interconnected, their effect tend to
depend on one another (Malmi & Brown, 2008; Otley, 1980). But there are certain aspects
which are central in MCSs, such as the focus on continuous feedback and performance
evaluation (Hood, 1991; Malmi & Brown, 2008).
Increased stress due to NPM reforms has mainly been explained as a result of cost reductions
and organizational change (Härenstam, Bejerot, Leijon, Scheele & Waldenstrom, 2004). The
purpose of this study is to extend the research by examining how increased management
control in a public service organization relates to stress. MCS are studied as a package
considered to be related to employee control and perceived stress. Furthermore, three specific
MCS components and their relation to perceived stress is examined; feedback from superior,
feedback from the information system and formality of performance evaluation.
Literature review
There are many definitions of stress (Cox, 1993; Hobfoll, 1989), implying that one has to be
clear of what position one adhere to. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) made a review of
contemporary stress research. They mean that many of the definitions can be categorized as
either stimulus or response definitions, which in turn have caused semantic difficulties.
Stimulus definitions focus on external events that are seen as normatively stressful, as for
example, natural disasters or the death of a close relative. The problem with the stimulus
definitions is that there are large variations in personal reaction to those events that are not
extreme. These definitions would therefore limit stress to extreme events and, for the purpose
of this paper, would be useless as stress here is studied in relation to MCS (i.e. everyday life
events) in organizations.
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Lazarus and Folkman (1984) mean that the other types of definitions, response definitions,
often are used in biology and medicine research. These focus on an internal “state of stress” or
behavior, for example that the individual is “reacting with stress” or being “distressed”. Such
a definition makes it difficult to identify in advance if an event is a stressor or not, as one has
to wait for the person´s reaction to make a judgment. Another problem is that responses can
faulty be considered to be states of stress when they are not. Furthermore, both stimulus and
response definitions tend to depend on one another with circular reasoning. For an event to be
a stressor, it has to result in a stress response, and for something to be a stress response it has
to be preceded by a stressor.
This definition suggests an operationalization that assesses the individuals’ perceived stress
with self-report measurements. How unpredictable, uncontrollable and to what extent the
person perceive that they do not have sufficient resources in relation to the demands are
common experiences of stress (Bandura, 1989; Cohen & Williamson, 1988; Cox, 1993;
Hobfoll, 1989). The relationship between the environment and the person is therefore
appraised by the subject himself or herself – only people themselves can answer if they
perceive that they, for example, do not have the resources to meet the demands (Cohen,
Kamarck & Mermelstein, 1983).
The cognitive appraisal process can be divided into primary and secondary appraisal. What
the person is evaluating is how demanding or threatening an event is (primary appraisal) and
how well one can handle or cope with this event (secondary appraisal). In the secondary
appraisal, coping can mean to alter the event itself, the situation, his or her own behavior or
emotions and cognitions. For example, if a situation at work would be appraised as
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demanding, with several projects that suddenly have become shorter deadlines, coping
behaviors can range from being external such as prioritizing tasks, to be internally directed
such as altering cognitions or to meditate (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). To perceive that one
has the freedom to act, to have control, is necessary for the former (Karasek, 1979; Lazarus &
Folkman, 1984).
In this study, a more specific definition of control is used which does not include skill
discretion as in Karasek´s model (1979). Here, control is considered as the freedom, the
decision authority, one has to decide how the work should be done and what tasks that should
be done in relation to the goals. This more focused conceptualization of control fits the
purpose of this paper. It is easier to visualize how employee control, in this more focused
sense, can be decreased if management control increases.
In laboratory studies, this type of control has been shown to have strong stress-buffering
effects (for review see Miller, 1978). In the second cognitive appraisal (Lazarus, 1991), mere
beliefs of this type of control can have effect on stress (Miller, 1978). In Miller´s (1978)
review of studies of control and stress, participants in laboratory studies who had in advance
been given the freedom to decide if or when to stop an aversive event, experienced less
arousal than those who had not been given this decision authority. They experienced less
arousal even if they did not make use of their granted freedom to stop. Miller explained these
observations with his minimax hypothesis. The participant know that his or her instrumental
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control “minimizes the maximum duration, intensity and/or frequency of the aversive event”
(p. 295), and attributes the relief to an internal source instead of an external source which
would be less stable.
In this way, employee control differs from skill discretion. Skill discretion can be argued not
to be job control per se (Wall et al., 1996). van der Doef, Maes and Diekstra (2000) measured
separately the effect of this focused type of control as a buffer on the stressor demand (time
pressure) and skill discretion, and also as an aggregate of them both (as in Karasek´s (1979)
original model) and found buffering effect on stressors in all conditions. This suggests that the
narrow focus of control, leaving out skill discretion, can adequately be considered when
studying stress in organizations.
Karasek and Theorell (1990) meant that increased management control implies decreased
employee control (although their definition included skill discretion). Management control in
this study is considered as all those behaviors, procedures and technologies that are used to
control the employee (Malmi & Brown, 2008; Simons, 1987). The combined practices of the
MCS package could be considered to decrease the type of employee control as defined in this
study. For example, all those administrative controls (Simons, 1987) that follow from
increased accountability (Blomgren, 2007; Hood, 1991) could be considered to interfere with
the employee control of how to execute the tasks. When demands are heightened, as in
increasing time pressure, this restricted situation entails less space for coping (Lazarus &
Folkman, 1984).
Some studies have not found support for that employee control is related to stress (for review
see Häuser et al., 2010). Warr (1994) argued that the relationship between employee control
and well-being is non-linear with an inverted U-shape. Control has only positive effects on
mental health up to a certain level, too high control is negative for the employee’s mental
health as it means higher responsibility, uncertainty and more difficult decision making. In a
similar vein, Eriksson (1991) meant that high control can be stressful for employees who in
their role and position at work often need to take decisions and reconsider decisions. This
“decision stress” is more likely to be experienced by officers than by workers. Still, to the
author´s knowledge, only partial or weak support has been found for Warr´s (1994) notion
that the relationship between employee control and mental health should be curvilinear (e.g.,
Jeurissen & Nyklicek, 2001). Further, in the present study, the organization in focus has
implemented tighter MCS after NPM reforms (Hood, 1991), which could mean that the
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employee´s autonomy is restricted to the degree that it seldom reaches the level argued in by
Eriksson (1991).
How the employees perceives their own control varies with their own cognitive appraisals
(Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). The totality, or the package, of all the management controls is
reflected in the subjective conceptualization of employee control. It captures the total effect,
including eventual interactions of all the intensified MCS on the employees own subjective
control. This is in line with Malmi and Brown´s (2008) reasoning that MCS should be studied
as a package if one wants to understand its effects on behavior and cognitions. To the extent
that employee control is decreased or increased, partly as a function of increased management
control, perceived stress is affected. From this reasoning, and together with the well replicated
notion that work demand is related to stress (Häuser et al., 2010; van der Doef & Maes, 1999),
two hypotheses can be deducted;
The research regarding how the MCS component feedback is related to stress is scarce and
inconclusive. In the later version of Karasek´s JDC-model, support was added as an additional
variable and considered a stress buffer (Karasek & Theorell, 1991). This variable is
operationalized by items concerning support from co-workers, and also feedback from
superiors (Häuser et al., 2010). As support is measured as an aggregate of them both, the pure
effect of feedback from superior is difficult to outline. However, the relation between
feedback and stress is in this paper understood from separate studies that when combined can
be argued to suggest a mediating role of goal clarity, coping and employee control, between
feedback and stress.
Latham, 2002; Verbeeten, 2008). It has also been suggested that feedback is necessary in
conjunction with specific goals to increase performance (Hirst & Lowy, 1990).
Elovainio and Kivimäki´s (1996) study on stress among nurses demonstrated that goal clarity,
as in clear awareness of the goals of one’s own work tasks, the work unit’s goals and the
organizational goals, was related to lower stress levels. Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek and
Rosenthal (1964) defined role ambiguity partly as what the employee experiences when he or
she has a lack of clarity over his or her duties, responsibilities and rights, and means-end
knowledge (knowledge of how to reach the goals). They found that role ambiguity was related
to job tension, lower satisfaction and lower self-confidence.
Sawyer (1992) studied the antecedents of clarity regarding goals and processes. Task
feedback from superior was positively related to process clarity, and recognition (for work
performed well) was positively related to goal clarity. In addition, recognition was also
positively related to job satisfaction. This suggests that feedback from the superior concerning
how to perform the task and recognition for when work has been done well is negatively
related to stress.
Elovainio and Kivimäki (1996) reasoned that goal clarity has a stress buffering effect because
it means that the employee understands the underlying causal links of increasing or decreasing
demands. How this understanding of the causal links behind the demands relates to stress can
also be understood from the cognitive appraisal phases and coping. As the MCS components
of feedback are tightly connected to what has to be done in the organization (Malmi & Brown,
2008) and thus the demands, one can assume that these have effect on each phase of the
employee’s cognitive appraisal process.
As feedback is a corrective action (Anderson & O`Reilley, 1981; Green & Welsh, 1984) and
as specific goals lead to more efficient behavior (Locke & Latham, 2002), the demands that
the employee is evaluating in the primary appraisal (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) may be lower
than if the goals had been unclear. The employee would spend less time and resources on
tasks that are irrelevant in relation to the goals, his or her efficiency would be increased which
avoids that work tasks pile up, causing unnecessary time-pressure to deadlines.
In the second appraisal (though occurring at the same time as the first), the person interprets
his or her own resources and to what extent he or she is able to cope with the demands
(Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). The skills one has in relation to the tasks are important in
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relation to stress (Karasek & Theorell, 1979). Bandura (1989) demonstrated that just the mere
belief of problem-solving skills, that one can cope with the demands, means less stress. He
termed this belief as “self-efficacy”. As feedback is bringing clarity to the goals (Sawyer,
1992) and how to reach them (Kahn et al., 1964), one can assume that this could make it
easier for the employee to structure, plan and schedule the tasks, thus increasing the self-
efficacy. In this way feedback could be assumed to facilitate coping.
As mentioned, the totality of the MCS components that has been intensified after NPM
reforms (Hood, 1991; Malmi & Brown, 2008) has been argued to lower the employees control
(Karasek, 1991). As the MCS component feedback is a corrective action (Anderson &
O`Reilley, 1981; Green & Welsh, 1984), it means that an employee that is working on a task
might be interfered. Thus, the freedom of how and what tasks that should be done could be
decreased. Still, from the positive effects of management control as feedback, this decrease in
freedom should not be that large that it takes away the positive effects of goal clarity and
coping. This leads to the third hypothesis;
Key performance indicators (KPI) purpose is to direct attention to critical success factors and
to hold employees accountable for performance in some specific areas (Malmi & Brown,
2008; Ittner & Larcker, 1998; Sanchez & Robert, 2010). One study that relates KPIs to stress
was found, a study by Eriksson and Fernholm (2011). They suggested that KPIs can be
perceived as increasing work demand, thus suggesting a positive relation to stress. However,
this was only the case for those employees that were new in the organization.
Studies suggest that KPIs should be adequate in relation to the objectives and overall goals.
They have to be updated when situations change to be kept relevant. If not, their effect in
directing employee behavior will not be adequate (Adler, 1999; Beatham, Anumba, Thorpe,
& Hedges, 2004). As it is clarity over the particular means-end knowledge and the overall
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goals that are negatively related to stress (Elovainio & Kivimäki, 1996; Kahn et al., 1964),
this study measures this type of feedback concerning its relevance, hence how the employee
perceives that the feedback helps her or him in relation to the goals and tasks.
Are employees making active use of the feedback from the information system? Wilson
(1997) means that people can differ in information-seeking behavior in regards to stress.
Krohne (1989) made a distinction between two classes of coping strategies; vigilance and
cognitive avoidance. “It is postulated that people can be habitually distinguished according to
how frequently they employ strategies of either one or the other class in situations of threat”.
That is, they tend to differ in the “frequent use of vigilant strategies on the one hand, with
frequent use of cognitive avoidant strategies on the other hand”. Vigilance can be explained as
“intolerance of uncertainty or negative surprise”, which make them inclined to extensive
monitoring, and cognitive avoidance as “intolerance of emotional arousal”, which means that
they try to avoid situational cues that could trigger their stress in the first place (p. 236-238).
This implies that some employees avoid the feedback from the information system; hence for
these employees this feedback will not increase the goal clarity or facilitate adequate coping
behaviors. Still, if the employee find the feedback relevant, and believe that the information
helps her or him, they would be more inclined to use the system, not to avoid it. In terms of
behaviorism, those actions that are followed by positive consequences are reinforcing – the
person is more likely to conduct the same actions again (Passer & Smith, 2004; Skinner,
1953). Therefore, this study measures to what extent the employee perceives that the
information system feedback helps him or her. This leads to the fourth hypothesis;
Formal goals have the advantage over informal (“do your best”) goals as they are more
specific. As mentioned, specific goals lead to better performance and are negatively related to
stress as they increase goal clarity (Elovainio & Kivimäki, 1996; Hartmann & Slapničar,
2009; Locke & Latham, 2002). In this way, formality of performance evaluation can be
argued to be negatively related to stress.
Another question concerns how the evaluation is related to stress. Would there be a difference
to be evaluated with formal rather than informal measures? A study by Hartmann and
Slapničar (2009) demonstrated that employees that were evaluated more on formal terms
perceived the evaluation procedure as more fair and had greater trust in their superiors.
Another study by Elovainio, Kivimäki and Helkama (2001) suggested that perceptions of
procedural justice and fairness have a moderating effect of employee control on stress. Thus,
formality of performance evaluation, if combined with employee control, could be assumed to
be negatively related to stress. This leads to the fourth hypothesis;
In sum, in a public service organization MCS are argued to lower the employee´s perception
of control, in terms of freedom to decide what task and how these tasks should be performed.
Still, specific MCS components, namely feedback from superior, feedback from the
information system and formality of performance evaluation are argued to increase goal
clarity, which facilitates the employee´s effort to cope with the demands. Hence, the
hypotheses were that work demand should be positively related to stress. Further, employee
control, feedback from supervisor, feedback from information system and formality of
performance evaluation should be negatively related to perceived stress.
Method
work conditions and productivity. The two offices were identical in regard to work procedures
and objectives.
Perceived stress.
The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) was developed by Cohen et al. (1983) to measure the
”degree to which situations in one's life are appraised as stressful. The PSS items were
designed to tap the degree to which respondents found their lives unpredictable,
uncontrollable, and overloading” (p. 387). A global measure of perceived stress was chosen
because this study examines the global impact of MCS as a package in relation to perceived
stress, and because the employees spend a large proportion of their days at work exposed to
these MCS. ”The PSS does not tie appraisal to particular situations; it is sensitive to the
nonoccurence of events as well as to ongoing life circumstances, to stress resulting from
events occurring in the lives of friends and relatives, and to expectations concerning future
events” (Cohen & Williamson, 1988, p. 34).
The 10-item version of the PSS (PSS-10) (Cohen & Williamson, 1988) was used. The
participant answered on a 5-point Likert scale: 1 (never), 2 (almost never), 3 (sometimes), 4
(fairly often) and 5 (very often), on questions such as “In the last month, how often have you
been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly?”. The instrument has shown
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improvement of processes). The answers on the other items (see below) are then weighted
with this point distribution over each individual participant. To weight after several different
performance areas is in line with Malmi and Brown´s (2008) notion that MCS should be
studied as packages in their effect on behavior and cognition.
The items come in two groups of four items each. A mean score with weighting of these four
items are then calculated. In addition, these two values are then combined as a mean of them
both, which is the variable Formality of Performance Evaluation. For example, the first item
addresses “How do you perceive that your immediate superiors evaluate your performance,
personal (Informal) / objective (Formal) evaluation, for efficiency? Mark more to the left (less
formal) or right (more formal) on the scale”. The participant answered on a 5-point Likert-
scale from 1 = Less formal (“When judging my performance, my superior uses his (her)
personal judgment of my performance”) to 5 = More formal (“When judging my
performance, my superior relies on objective information from the information system”), for
the performance areas efficiency, customer contacts, external cooperation and quality.
Factor analysis
As this study uses variables with items from different instruments, some variables´ items were
similar to the items of one another, meaning that there was lack of discriminant validity
between the constructs. For example, the PSS-10 scale (Cohen et al., 1988) includes items
that address how uncontrollabe the participant find situations in his or her life, which makes it
vulnerable to be ”intertwined” with the construct Employee Control from the QWC
questionnaire (Anderzén & Arnetz, 2005). To solve this and to achieve discriminant validity,
exploratory factor analysis was performed in SPSS. The dataset was first scrutinized for
potential outliers; two were excluded due to error in coding. All the items from the five a
priori constructs were then added to the exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation.
Concerning the items from the Formality of Performance Evaluation scale, these were added
after weighting (see above).
As expected, some items from the a priori separate constructs loaded on the same factors.
These items were deleted completely from the analysis. Further, items that were loading under
0.32 were excluded from their constructs (as proposed by Tabachnik and Fidell, 2001).
Furthermore, factors with eigenvalues greater than one were retained, and only the first six
factors which corresponded to the variables that the items were presumed to measure (as
proposed by Kaiser, 1960). New constructs were then manually computed and are presented
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in Table 1 together with the retained items. All items, including those that were excluded from
the factor analysis, are presented in the appendix. The reliability estimates (Cronbach´s
Alpha) ranged from 0.65 to 0.84.
The eventual problem of common method variance, that can imply biases in behavioural
research that uses self-reports (see Podsakoff and Organ, 1986), was addressed by the factor
analysis. According to Podsakoff and Organ (1986), "if a substantial amount of common
method variance is present, either (a) a single factor will emerge from the factor analysis, or
(b) one "general" factor will account for the majority of the covariance in the independent and
criterion variables" (p. 536). See Table 1, none of the factors are constituting more than 50%
of the total variance. Thus, eventual common method variance was considered to be of no
concern in the data.
Table 1. Factor analysis with eigenvalues (E) and % of variance (V) for each factor and factor
loadings and communalities for the retained items.
Factor
Factor and item Communality
loading
Factor 1: Perceived Stress (E = 4.08, V = 22.67 %)
In the last month, how often have you been upset because of 0.57 0.50
something that happened unexpectedly?
In the last month, how often have you felt confident about your 0.52 0.40
ability to handle your personal problems?
In the last month, how often have you felt that things were 0.74 0.55
going your way?
In the last month, how often have you found that you could not 0.65 0.50
cope with all the things that you had to do?
In the last month, how often have you been able to control 0.77 0.64
irritations in your life?
In the last month, how often have you felt that you have had 0.81 0.71
control over things?
Factor 2: Information System Feedback (E = 2.72, Variance = 15.13 %)
From the information system I can understand if I do a good 0.80 0.74
job
From the information system I can understand if I do a bad job 0.79 0.73
The information system directs my attention to relevant task 0.83 0.76
related problems
The information from the systems helps me to analyze how 0.84 0.77
task related problems should be addressed
Factor 3: Formality of Performance Evaluation (E = 1.89, Variance = 10.47 %)
Formality of Performance Evaluation 1* 0.89 0.81
Formality of Performance Evaluation 2* 0.80 0.76
Factor 4: Work Demand (E = 1.43, Variance = 7.96 %)
Do you have time to plan you work tasks in advance? 0.81 0.72
Do you have enough time to complete your work tasks? 0.77 0.74
Factor 5: Feedback from Superior (E = 1.11, Variance = 6.18 %)
Do you get clear word directives from immediate supervisor? 0.85 0.76
Do you get feedback from your immediate supervisor when 0.80 0.77
tasks have been done well?
Factor 6: Employee Control (E = 1.09, Variance = 6.07 %)
Do you have decision latitude for deciding how your work 0.79 0.75
should be done?
Do you have decision latitude for deciding what tasks should 0.90 0.78
be done?
* Weighted group of items - see heading Formality of performance evaluation p.12-13.
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Results
Means, standard deviations and skewness estimates of the variables are presented in Table 2.
The mean value of Feedback from Superior is high, 3.39 (maximum possible value 4), which
indicates that the employees in general perceive that they often get feedback from their
superior. This also means that the score distribution for that variable is negatively skewd.
Further, the variable Formality of Performance Evaluation is relatively high, 3.59 (maximum
possible value 5), indicating that the employees perceive that they are evaluated by their
superior more on formal than informal terms.
Table 2. Means (standard deviation) and skewness (standard error) for all variables.
Variable Mean (SD) Skewness (SE)
Perceived Stress 2.44 (0.65) 0.13 (0.21)
Work Demand 1.93 (0.74) 0.64 (0.21)
Employee Control 2.79 (0.79) -0.31 (0.21)
Feedback from Superior 3.38 (0.64) -1.20 (0.21)
Information System Feedback 2.22 (0.67) -0.16 (0.21)
Formality of Performance Evaluation 3.59 (0.77) -0.31 (0.21)
Before interpreting the results from the multiple regression analysis, it was first examined if
multicollinearity had to be taken into consideration. According to Hair et al. (1998), tolerance
values of 0.1 or below and variance of inflation factor (VIF) values of 10 or above indicate
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high multicollinearity. The tolerance values ranged from 0.44 to 0.89 and the VIF values
ranged from 1.16 to 2.28. Thus, when interpreting the results, multicollinearity does not need
to be considered.
As can be seen in Table 4, the variable Work Demand is positively related to Perceived
Stress, and Feedback from Superior is negatively related to Perceived Stress. None of the
other variables are significantly related to stress. Thus, support is only found for Hypothesis 1
and Hypothesis 3. The standardized regression equation is summarized as:
Table 4. Summary of multiple regression for variables predicting Perceived Stress (n = 127).
Discussion
The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between MCS as a package and stress
in a public service organization. It was hypothesized that work demand should be positively
related to stress and employee control negatively related to stress. Further, it was
hypothesized that the specific MCS components feedback from superior, feedback from
information system and formality of performance evaluation should be negatively related to
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stress. The results gave only support for that work demand is positively and feedback from
superior is negatively related to stress.
That work demand was positively related to stress is in line with numerous of studies that
have replicated this finding. Increasing time pressure often goes hand in hand with perceived
stress (Häuser et al., 2010; van der Doef & Maes, 1999), also in this public service
organization.
The result that employee control was not related to stress was unexpected. Eriksson (1991)
and Warr (1994) meant that too high control, implying high responsibility and decision stress,
leads to perceived stress. If that was the case, this could have obscured the results. A
suggestion for future studies is to include measures of decision stress and other negative
effects of very high control to examine if such aspects should be accounted for when studying
control and stress in public service organizations.
As predicted, feedback from superior was negatively related to stress. Studies have previously
shown that the support dimension that was added in the later versions of Karasek´s JDC-
model is negatively related to stress. This support dimension was an aggregate of both
different kinds of support, such as emotional support from colleagues, and of feedback from
superior. This study extends the research by showing that also feedback as a standalone
construct is negatively related to stress. That feedback should be related to stress was inferred
from separate studies showing that feedback is positively related to goal clarity (Sawyer,
1992), and other studies showing that goal clarity is negatively related to stress (Elovainio &
Kivimäki, 1996). The present study extended the research by showing that feedback from
superior is directly related to stress.
As feedback is a corrective action (Anderson & O`Reilley, 1981; Green & Welsh, 1984),
increasing feedback means higher management control. Karasek and Theorell (1990) meant
that employee control should decrease with management control. And with decreased
employee control, in combination with high demands, would mean higher stress. The result of
this study does not fully support this notion. Feedback from superior was negatively related to
stress. Further, the results from the bivariate correlations suggest that employee control
increases when feedback from superior increases. A suggestion for future studies is to
examine how specific MCS components are related to employee control.
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It was also argued that feedback could facilitate for the employees to cope with the demands.
As the goals get clearer, the employees get more efficient and as such they might perceive a
higher self-efficacy, which is negatively related to stress (Bandura, 1989). This suggests a
distinction between job control in terms of freedom for deciding how and what tasks that
should be done, and employee control as the belief of being able to perform efficiently, handle
problems and so forth.
That feedback from a different source, from the information system, was not related to stress
was unexpected. As with feedback from superior, the negative relation to stress was deducted
from the reasoning that it should increase goal clarity and facilitate coping. The reason for the
non-significant result may stem from that employees have different information seeking
behaviors, some avoid the information and some seek it to facilitate coping (Krohne, 1989;
Wilson, 1997). Still, the present study measured not only how relevant they found the
feedback, but also if it helped them to solve procedural problems. For those that found it
useful for solving problems, thus facilitating coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), it should
serve as a positive reinforcer increasing the likelihood that the behavior is repeated (Skinner,
1953; Passer & Smith, 2004). Hence, eventual differences in information seeking behavior
could be assumed to have been accounted for in the method of this study. That is, those
employees that scored high on the items that addressed the positive problem solving usage of
the feedback should likely be the same who actively use the system. However, a suggestion
for future studies is to measure the information seeking behavior of the employees to outline
its effects.
That formality of performance evaluation was not related to stress was also unexpected. The
hypothesis was derived from the notion that specific goals lead to higher efficiency (Locke &
Latham, 2002) and goal clarity, which should facilitate coping (Elovainio & Kivimäki, 1996;
Bandura, 1989). An explanation for why it was not related to stress can be to compare it with
feedback from superior. Both these hypotheses were partly derived from the concept of goal
clarity. Feedback from superior is a feedback that is given continuously during the daily work
processes; the goals that get clear are more particular, addressing the everyday work processes
(Kahn et al., 1964). The performance evaluation meetings took only place each 6 weeks
which suggests that the goals cannot be as specific concerning the work processes as feedback
which is given continuously. This suggests that the frequency of feedback, how often it is
given and when, matters in its relation to stress. Future research could address this by
longitudinal studies where the frequency of performance evaluation meetings is manipulated.
20
In addition, it would be interesting to examine if goal clarity mediates the role between
formality of performance evaluation and perceived stress.
In sum, this study extended the research of management control, employee control and the
relation to stress. Management control through the MCS component feedback from superior is
negatively related to stress. This suggests that interventions of increasing feedback from
superiors can have positive effects on reducing stress in organizations. The notions that
management control increases at the expense of employee control, and that this would
increase stress, is partly questioned. When management control is meant as feedback from
superior, management control is negatively related to perceived stress.
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Appendix
Table 6. The Quality Work Competence (QWC) questionnaire (Anderzén & Arnetz, 2005).
Summary of all the items for the variables used in this study. Original QWC variable names
in parentheses.
Work Demand (Work Tempo)
1. Time for planning work duties in advance
2. Sufficient time to execute tasks
3. Time to consider how tasks have been carried out
4. Time to consider how work processes could be improved in your department
Employee Control (Participatory Management)
1. Latitude for deciding how work should be done
2. Latitude for deciding what tasks should be done
3. Sufficient influence in relationship to responsibilities
4. Opportunity to influence workplace decisions
5. Opportunity to comment on the information received from immediate supervisor
Feedback from Superior (Feedback)
1. Clear work directives from immediate supervisor
2. Feedback from supervisor when tasks have been done well
3. Feedback from supervisor when tasks have been done poorly
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Table 7. Information System Feedback (Simon et al., 1954). All items including one
additional item that was added in this study.
1. From the information system I can understand if I do a good job
2. From the information system I can understand if I do a bad job
3. The information system directs my attention to relevant task related problems
4. The information from the systems helps me to analyze how task related problems should
be addressed
Table 8. The Formality of Performance Evaluation Scale. Original name: The Formality of
Performance Measurement Scale (Hartmann & Slapničar, 2009).
Performance area weights
1. Efficiency (e.g., *)
2. Contacts with clients (e.g., *)
3. External collaboration (e.g., *)
4. Quality (e.g., *)