آیا جو سازمانی رابطه بین استرس شغلی و قصد ماندن را معتدل میکند؟ شواهد از ماکائو SAR، چین Does organizational climate moderate the relationship between job stress and intent to stay?: Evidence from Macau SAR, China

Introduction Job stress is a topic of active research because a stressed-workforce can be a burden to organizational performance. Having said so, the cost of workplace stress includes but is not limited to reduced productivity (Singh, 2000), absenteeism (Gray, 2007), compensation claims (Keegel et al., 2009) and direct medical expenses (Guthrie et al., 2010). Job stress can also discourage employees’ intention to stay (Vong and Tang, 2017). Unlike other types of stress-induced managerial costs, which are specific measurable expenditures, the cost of losing an invaluable employee cannot be easily measured in quantitative terms. Managing workplace stress is therefore important for business organizations not only because money matters but also because retaining talents is the prerequisite condition to achieving long term corporate success. This is even truer in a tight labor market in which skilled and professional workers always have the upper hand to choose between multiple employment offers. Organizations that fail to address the problem of workplace stress may find themselves on the defensive when it comes to attracting and retaining talents. For these reasons, academicians and practitioners alike have strived to identify those aspects of the work environment such as work overload, management style and role ambiguity that are the probable sources of job stress, hence to tackle the problem at its root. While it is absolutely appropriate and necessary to combat the stress problem by resolving the stressors (i.e. the antecedents of job stress), job stress can have multiple sources so much so that it is intuitively impossible to eradicate job stress by simply attending to the stressors. Because of this, it is equally important for organizations to come up with effective interventions that can mitigate job stress’ negative consequences at the workplace. This means to explore and identify those managerial actions that can buffer in between job stress and its accompanying negative consequences. In this perspective, literature abounds with studies that have identified different forms of interventions likely to moderate job stress’ influences at the workplace. These interventions include employee characteristics such as age (Mauno et al., 2013), gender (Jayathilaka and Subasinghe, 2016), organizational rank (Kim et al., 2009) and organizational tenure (Jayathilaka and Subasinghe, 2016; Ciobot
a, 2013) as well as managerial actions and programs such as social support (Rathi and Barath, 2013), supervisory support (Karatepe, 2010), workplace initiatives (Wickramasinghe, 2010), managerial orientations (Sumrall and Sebastianelli, 1999) and organizational resources (Marwat et al., 2012).