Role Conflict and Role Strain

Role conflict and role strain are concepts originating from role theory, which examines the expectations and behaviors associated with different social roles within a societal framework. Role conflict arises when individuals face contradictory demands from multiple roles they occupy, leading to psychological tension and stress. For example, a working parent may find it challenging to balance responsibilities at home with professional obligations, resulting in conflicting expectations. Conversely, role strain occurs within a single role when an individual cannot meet the competing demands associated with that role, such as a parent feeling overwhelmed by both childcare responsibilities and job commitments.

Both role conflict and role strain can manifest in various social contexts, including the workplace and family life. They are particularly pronounced among individuals in caregiving positions, where the pressures of balancing work and home life can lead to negative health outcomes. Women, in particular, may experience heightened role conflict and strain due to societal expectations surrounding gender roles and the division of labor. Understanding these concepts is essential for recognizing the complexities of social interactions and the impact of societal structures on individual experiences.

Published in: 2021

By: Howson, Alexandra

Subject Terms

Role Conflict and Role Strain

In the middle of the twentieth century role theory was an especially prominent framework in sociology for understanding social behavior. Role theory was developed by American sociologist Talcott Parsons and his work on social systems, by German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, and by Erving Goffman's work on social life as theater and performance. One the one hand, the concept of social roles refers to expected behavioral patterns, obligations, and privileges attached to a particular status in a social structure or social system. On the other, in microsocial analysis, social role typically invokes the dramaturgical sense (theatrical) of the part a person plays in social life (Straus, 2002, p. 380). In both structural and interactionist accounts of social roles, socialization is a key process through which individuals learn a range of obligations and norms associated with the roles they come to occupy. Roles are associated with a given social status and an individual may occupy several roles as part of a role-set. As a consequence, they may experience both role conflict and role strain. Role conflict occurs when individuals experience contradictory demands from the different roles they perform. Role strain occurs when individuals experience contradictory demands from the same role. Although role theory (also developed within social psychology) is not as prominent in contemporary sociology, the concept of role is an important tool and is most often deployed to understand the everyday dynamics and complexity of people's lives in the contest of home-work conflict and care of dependents.

Keywords Dramaturgical Perspective; Role Conflict; Role-Set; Role Strain; Socialization; Social Role; Social Status; Social System

Overview

Society can be viewed as a social system in which there are many elements working together and many relationships connecting these elements. A social system is typically understood as having emergent properties of its own that are distinct from the properties of its elements, and, like the human body that provides the underlying metaphor for society as a social system, is generally seen as having an inherent tendency toward equilibrium, achieving internal balance and external harmony in relation to other social systems (Marshall, 1994).

In social systems theory, individuals are linked to each other through relationships and exchanges of information that contribute to an interdependent whole. Each participant in the system plays an identifiable part, or role. Analysis of social systems focuses on how the elements of a system are tied together and how the system works internally (for instance, the family might be one system) and in relation to other systems (for instance, how families together make up and relate to a community). Within structural-functionalism, systems are underpinned by patterns of social life that are determined by functional necessity. While contemporary versions of systems theory have moved away from emphasizing functional necessity, they nevertheless continue to view roles as the organizing basis of systems (Straus, 2002).

Any given social system is comprised of social groups, which are characterized by repeated and relatively stable patterns of interaction among individual members, who are structurally tied to each other (e.g. through kinship relations); share a set of goals, values, beliefs, and norms; and identify themselves with the group (Giddens, 1997).

Individuals are socialized through primary groups and through these primary groups acquire their awareness of and attachment to social norms and values, as well as their emergent sense of self. Primary groups, such as the family or close friends, have the most influence on people, while secondary groups, such as workmates, have somewhat lesser though nonetheless distinct influence.

While primary socialization occurs early in life and is typically associated with childhood, sociologists generally agree that socialization occurs across the life course and that people can redefine and change the roles into which they have been socialized. Moreover, as people move through the life course, they are often expected to leave one role behind and take on the obligations of another. Or, as they move from membership of one social group into another they are expected to take on the obligations associated with the new group. The norms and values associated with and performed through social roles express the social status of individuals within a given social group.

Social status refers to the position that an individual holds within a particular group (such as the father within a family) or in the social structure in general (such as teacher within a particular community) and the prestige or authority associated with that position. An individual's master status (Hughes, 1945) is his or her primary identifying characteristic. Status in a social hierarchy can be ascribed or achieved, and status is typically accompanied by various symbols and may also be accompanied by inconsistencies within a particular status. Ascribed status cannot be transformed or changed by people themselves and is typically associated with being born into a particular family or being born male or female. In contrast, achieved status is associated with voluntary action and with doing something that earns a position in the social pecking order that is either positive (e.g. heroic action) or negative (e.g. criminal action).

Status is occupied while social roles, that is, the behaviors, obligations, and privileges attached to a particular status, are performed. Individuals are members of many different groups (e.g. the family of origin, friendship groups, professional groups); occupy different statuses within these groups; and as such, perform a range of roles at any given time. In order to perform these roles, people need to be aware of the roles of others and know how their roles relate to the roles of others in their particular group. This constellation of roles constitutes a role-set and can be illustrated by examining the roles associated with being sick.

The Sick Role

Talcott Parsons' description of the sick role (1951) is an example of how people anticipate and take on a new role in a particular social system: the medical system. Parsons “was concerned with understanding how the sick person related to the whole social system, and what the person's function is in that system” (McQueen, 2002). In this example, people are able to take on the sick role not only because they know what others expect of them but they are also aware of the role-set associated with the status of being sick. When people become sick this can make an impact on their ability to fulfill social obligations (such as work or parenting). This impact is not simply a consequence of how disease affects the human body but of the extent to which the experience of disease is socially sanctioned.

Parsons (1951) argued that what constitutes illness in a given culture will be related to the norms and values that prevail. In The Encyclopedia of Public Health, David McQueen (2002) notes that ultimately, the sick role allows individuals to be integrated into the medical care system and to take on behaviors compliant with the expectations of the medical system. The sick role has four chief characteristics:

• First, the sick person (that is, the person who feels unwell and who is medically sanctioned as sick) is freed from carrying out normal social roles. For example, a minor chest cold “allows” one to be excused from small obligations such as attending a social gathering. By contrast, a major heart attack allows considerable time away from work and social obligations.

• Second, people in the sick role are not directly responsible for their plight.

• Third, the sick person needs to try to get well.

• Finally, in the sick role, the sick person must seek competent help and cooperate with medical care to get well.

This “conceptual schema implies many reciprocal relations between the sick person (the patient) and the healer (the physician). Thus the function of the physician is one of social control” (McQueen, 2002).

According to social role theory, behavioral sex differences arise from the differentiated social roles inhabited by women and men, especially those concerning the division of labor. Parsons and his colleague Robert F. Bales (1955) examined how role differentiation within families occurred in order to functionally support society as a social system. They argued that families are differentiated on two levels or dimensions (Waters, 1994). First, family members, such as parents and children, are differentiated from each other according to their relative power (parents hold positions of authority over children). Second, members are differentiated from each other according to the types of activity they undertake within the family. Parsons and Bales observed that all social groups participate in task-oriented (instrumental) and solidarity-oriented (expressive) activities and linked this latter form of differentiation to biological differences between men and women. Simply put, they argued that in industrialized societies, instrumental activities are undertaken by men, while women undertake expressive activities because biology (namely women's reproductive potential) ties women more closely to emotional and caretaking duties. This internal differentiation has led many researchers to argue that women experience more role conflict and role strain than men, which has an impact on women’s health and well-being.

Applications

Role Conflict

Role conflict arises from multiple roles that are incompatible (Katz & Kahn, 1978), discrepant role expectations, and the inability to resolve these incompatible expectations (Pomaki, Supeli & Verhoeven, 2007). Role conflict is described as “the psychological tension aroused by conflicting role pressures” (Hammer & Thompson, 2003) and has been linked to poor health outcomes and chronic stress. In addition, role conflict is strongly associated with particular social groups, especially individuals in occupations such as medical doctors, nurses, and teachers, all of whom may occupy several professional roles (e.g. administrator, clinician, researcher) in one workplace setting.

For instance, there are several studies that explore how nurses deal with their changing roles when they are not only nurses but also nurse researchers. In the first role, they have a duty to care for patients (this is a therapeutic role). In the second, their duty is to collect data to support clinical research. However, many nurses report lack of clarity in the boundaries separating these roles and many experience conflict between the scientific values embedded in the researcher role and the therapeutic values associated with the nurse role (Wilkes & Beale, 2005).

Effect on Working Women

Role conflict may also arise for people who occupy roles in the workplace and in the home and when the demands or expectations of one role make it difficult to undertake the obligations associated with another. For instance, for many people, role conflict is a chronic condition that accompanies work and home life and may contribute to emotional exhaustion and erode work-role performance (Schiemann, McBrier & Van Gundy, 2003). This conflict may be especially acute for women. The gender segregation in the workplace and the demands of the "second shift" faced by working women at home may cause women to face more challenges in making the transition from work roles to home roles and create tensions between them that contribute to poor health outcomes (Hochschild, 1989). However, other researchers have found that among certain social groups, poor health that is linked to home-work role conflict affects both men and women (Emslie, Hunt & MacIntyre, 2004).

In the examples above, it can be seen that “work-family conflict is bi-directional” and that “work can interfere with family (referred to as work-to-family conflict) and family can interfere with work (referred to as family-to-work conflict)” (Hammer & Thompson, 2003). This may be especially marked for working mothers, who may incur social and professional penalties for trying to fulfill a double life as a professional and as a parent. For instance, studies of women in medicine suggest that as professionals, women may be seen as lacking seriousness; as mothers, they may be seen as lacking selflessness (Paleou & Herbert, 2002). In occupational contexts, role conflict can also lead to role stress and thus to occupational burnout. In enduringly stressful situations, professionals tend to depersonalize their clients or patients as a dysfunctional way of coping. In turn, this undermines their performance and reduces personal accomplishment and their ability to cope. The emotional exhaustion that ensues contributes to occupational burnout (Peiró et al., 2001).

Role Strain

Role strain occurs in the presence of contradictory demands of the same role, where an individual cannot meet the competing demands of a particular role or does not have the resources to meet the demands of the role. As with role conflict, role strain can be especially demanding for people who are both employees and parents. Role strain in such contexts is linked to demands such the child's age and needs and the parents' job demands and hours worked, while the resources a parent might draw on to deal with these demands include household income, child care arrangements, and support from coworkers and community. One study found that role strain was strongly associated with being female, having a child under the age of six, working long hours, having a demanding job, having higher income, having less-than-adequate child care arrangements, and receiving little support from coworkers (Scharlach, 2001). In such examples, it is not only that there are conflicts involved in managing two distinct roles (where such conflict may exist), but that the demands of each particular role are high and people find it difficult to meet them. Consequently, they experience each role as a burden.

Like role conflict, role strain can also contribute to poor physical and mental health outcomes, depending on the context in which it occurs, the time required to undertake the obligations associated with a particular role, and the resources available to meet these expectations (Hecht, 2001). In the context of childcare, for instance, parents who have paid household help may experience fewer feelings of role strain, as they are able to delegate some of the volume of their tasks. Similarly, some studies on midlife women and the role of grandparenting suggest that role strain can arise when age-related roles are disrupted. Given the extent to which transitions in and out of some roles are dependent on age, grandparents who also are the primary caregivers to their grandchildren (acting therefore as parents) find that their age-related hopes and plans for the future and dreams of leisure in midlife are disrupted (Cooney & An, 2006). Life course perspectives suggest that midlife is a period associated with fewer family obligations and expectations of expanded peer and personal time. Caring for grandchildren increases the demands associated with the grandparenting role and reduces the potential for enjoying these expectations.

Finally, support organizations such as the Family Care Research Program at Michigan State University acknowledge that people who care for family members who are disabled or sick may experience role strain. They identify the following feelings as indicators of role strain:

• You may be overwhelmed by daily tasks

• You may feel frustrated or angry due to added responsibilities

• You may experience anxiety and/or sadness about your care situation

• You may notice fatigue or lack of energy

• You may be dissatisfied with your ability to perform caregiving tasks, routine tasks, or your relationship with your partner ("Partner Role Strain," 2004).

Viewpoints

Role Switching as the Modern Way

Where traditional societies are characterized by fewer roles, modern society is marked by multiple roles (Simmel, 1955). In fact, recent proliferation of communication technologies (such as cell phones, email, handheld computers, and text messaging) have dramatically increased the opportunities available for individuals to 'switch' roles without even switching role-related environments or geographical domains, in effect performing two or more roles successively and/or simultaneously (Danna-Lynch, 2005). You could say that role switching is required in modern societies and if so, perhaps the conflict that people are said to experience in switching from one role to another might not be as great as has been suggested.

To test this hypothesis and measure the conflict and strain experienced in multiple role occupation, one study used in-depth interviews and participant logbooks to examine how people coped with switching from one role to another (for instance, from employee to parent) and explored how participants balanced their multiple roles (Danna-Lynch, 2005). Participants talked about how they switch from one role to another. For example, one participant, a minister and married father of two children, described how he switches between his work and home roles:

When I leave my office, I really try to leave it all behind, to separate myself completely from my work identity. So when I get home, I focus on my kids, my family. My wife is usually making dinner or something like that, so I do the "Dad-thing" and just take care of the kids so she can do that. So, to get things done, I basically switch from one to the other, from minister to Dad (Danna-Lynch, 2005, p. 7).

However, not all participants were able to switch as clearly from one role to another and described carrying parts of one role into another role in ways that may produce strain and conflict, because of the time and energy it takes to manage multiple roles. This is especially likely when the role associated with one environmental context (such as parent, which is associated with the home) encroaches on the role associated with a different context (such as work, which for most people, occurs outside the home). For instance, a parent may get a call at work about a child who is sick and needs attention. At such times, it may be difficult to move smoothly from one role to another and so conflict is experienced. Nonetheless, the switching inherent to the multitasking culture of modern societies makes it more likely that people learn more effective strategies to anticipate and cope with role conflict.

Conclusion

Although role conflict and role strain may be used interchangeably, “the relationship to time differs between the two. Role conflict implies that competing demands arise during particular or overlapping point(s) in time. When this occurs, the individual often must choose which demand to satisfy, in effect privileging one role over the other, at least for the moment. In contrast, role strain (or overload) refers to a process tied to a wider span of time—the volume of tasks is simply too heavy given the time available” (Hecht, 2001, p. 112). However, in both cases, the feelings experienced (frustration, being overwhelmed, fatigue, anger, or anxiety) are less a consequence of the meanings that people attach to their roles than of the structural and material environments in which roles take place.

Terms & Concepts

Dramaturgical Perspective: A framework for explaining how individuals, social groups, and institutions manage information by engaging in performances to present particular impressions to those with whom they interact.

Role Conflict: Conflict that stems from multiple roles that are incompatible, discrepant role expectations, and the inability to resolve those incompatible expectations.

Role-Set: Understanding the roles of others and how their roles relate to the roles of oneself and others in a particular group.

Role Strain: Stress that stems from contradictory demands of the same role, in which an individual cannot meet the competing demands of a particular role or does not have the resources to meet the demands of the role.

Socialization: The process through which people learn to become members of society by internalizing norms, values, and social roles.

Social Role: Expected behavior patterns, obligations, and privileges attached to a particular status in a social structure or social system.

Social Status: Position that an individual holds within a particular group or in the social structure in general and the prestige or authority associated with that position.

Social System: Entity with emergent properties of its own that are distinct from the properties of its elements and that has an inherent tendency toward equilibrium.

Bibliography

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Danna-Lynch, K. (2005). From cultural scripts to sociocognitive performances: Managing multiple roles in a multitasking world. Conference Papers, American Sociological Association, Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, pp.1-22. Retrieved July 8, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=18615032&site=ehost-live

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Role Conflict and Role Strain

On this Page

Subject Terms

Role Conflict and Role Strain

Overview

The Sick Role

Applications

Role Conflict

Effect on Working Women

Role Strain

Viewpoints

Role Switching as the Modern Way

Conclusion

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

Suggested Reading

Role Conflict and Role Strain

On this Page

Subject Terms

Role Conflict and Role Strain

Overview

Social Systems Theory

Social Groups & Socialization

Social Status & Role-Sets

The Sick Role

Social Role Theory & Gender

Applications

Role Conflict

Effect on Working Women

Role Strain

Viewpoints

Role Switching as the Modern Way

Conclusion

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

Suggested Reading