A Study of Job Stressors Among B2B Senior Solicitors: An Abstract

Abstract

Professional services firms (PSFs) try to provide high levels of service quality to their customers as they need to be profitable to survive in the competitive market. PSFs are known to have some specific characteristics. First of all, they are human-intensive firms meaning that professional service employees directly create their products. In addition, these professional staffs are considered as mobile and skilled work forces. In other words, they possess a position enabling them to bargain toward their firms (Nordenflycht 2010) since their skills can be transferred to other companies easily (Teece 2003). Although job engagement level of non-front-line employees have experienced an increase from 2009 to 2012, statistics show that job engagement of front-line employees has declined in that period (Gallup 2013). Therefore, it is a critical issue for PSFs to have engaged employees because there are several evidences illustrating that disengaged employees are more probable to leave their jobs (Schaufeli and Bakker 2004; Chang et al. 2009; Knudsen et al. 2009; Hu et al. 2011). Instead, engaged employees provide higher levels of service quality compared to disengaged employees leading to more customer satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to explore the associations between job demands, job resources and job engagement in professional employees. Using the job demands-resources (JD-R) theory (Demerouti et al. 2001; Bakker et al. 2010), this research was designed to investigate how job demands (i.e. role conflict and role ambiguity) can influence job engagement in lawyers as professional employees and how a job resource (i.e. job autonomy) may affect the relationships between job demands and job engagement. For this purpose, we collected data from 229 senior solicitors who worked on business cases. The results show that job engagement of solicitors is affected by role conflict negatively. In addition, the analysis depicts that job autonomy moderates the relationship between role ambiguity and job engagement.