Indian Women at Workplace: Coping with “Role boundedness” through “Hardiness”

Abstract

Stress has become a matter of concern in the present post-globalization world which has brought in enormous changes in the ways organizations work, the professionals’ work-style and pattern, extended working hours, meeting deadlines, added roles and responsibilities, role overload and ambiguities; and cultural and technological changes. Researchers have demonstrated a gender variation with respect to coping with role stressors or stressful life events. Golpelwar [1] finds that Indian women professionals suffer from a role stress typically termed as “Role boundedness”, a result of wanting “to be everything for everybody”. The present descriptive research work, probably one of the first on the issue, highlights the importance of “hardiness” - a stress resilient personality disposition [2] - in coping with “role boundedness” and shows a relationship between role boundedness and hardiness in women professionals indicative of the protective mechanism of hardiness in coping with role boundedness.