Organisational Role Stress and Employee Burnout in Pharmaceutical Industry

'Burnout' causes total lessening of a person's both physical and mental resources caused by excessive and prolonged level of job stress thereby affects their job performance. Many job related characters such as role conflict and role ambiguity are related to burnout. While many empirical studies are done on the employees' burnt out at international level, in India we have one authentic study by Sharma. The study analyses the effects of burnout in four dimensional aspects such as stress personality, organisational role stress, emotional intelligence, personal effectiveness and adjustments. The present study has adapted and operationalises sharma's model and looks into one of the dimensional aspects of burnout namely 'organisational role stresses'. This study has taken random sample of 175 employees of thirty six years from a leading Pharmaceutical sector. Using regression Analysis and Anova test on various predictors such as role ambiguity, resources inadequacy, inter-role distance, role isolation and personal inadequacies are able to explain the phenomenon of burnt out significantly. Among them 'role ambiguity' appears to high contributor to the process of burnout of the employees. There is lack of clarity or poor understanding about the role of executives which creates stress and thereby the burnout. The study concludes that burnout is an important issue in the pharmaceutical industry, especially among the middle level executives.