Role conflict and role ambiguity among respiratory care managers

The health occupations and management literature does not specifically address role stress among technical directors of respiratory care departments. We undertook an analysis of role conflict, role ambiguity, and job satisfaction among technical directors of respiratory care departments in Texas.

We distributed a questionnaire designed to measure role conflict and ambiguity and a questionnaire to elicit demographic and organization data to 283 technical directors in all Texas hospitals with more than 75 beds. Organization characteristics and demographic factors were studied as moderators.

Analysis of the 199 responses received revealed that both role conflict (mean [SD] 3.86 [0.97] on 7.0 scale) and role ambiguity (2.64 [0.93] on 7.0 scale) scores were low compared to the neutral point of measure. Role overload, a component of role conflict, was found to be above the neutral point (4.64 [1.85]). One-way analysis of variance revealed no significant differences between the role conflict or the role ambiguity measures based on age, race, gender, number of employees supervised, size of institution, and position to which the respondent reported. Role conflict and role overload were each found to have significant negative correlations with job satisfaction (p less than 0.01).

We are encouraged by the low role-conflict and ambiguity scores observed but concerned about the elevated role-overload scores. We believe that an in-depth study of role overload among respiratory care managers is warranted.