Research On The Impact Of Perceived Threat Of Terrorism On Employees’ Maladaptive Coping

Terrorism has become the salient scourge of the contemporary world and has demonstrated deleterious effects.It has existed for ages and has been understood and interpreted in many ways.Evidently,the cost of terrorism is not limited to the loss of lives only,psychological cost of terrorism is also noteworthy and highly detrimental for the affected community and cannot be neglected.As the hallmark of terrorism is its unpredictability,attacks non-combatants,generate fear in public.Such fear instills worry of becoming a victim,even among those who have never confronted terrorist activity.Numerous studies have investigated the employees’ sensitivity to terrorist attack contributing to explain behaviors and attitudes toward their organization and job in a violent operating environment.However,segment of employees working overtly uncovered to the terrorism affected surroundings are still under-researched,as all previous studies utilized samples operating indoors.Considering their exceedingly sensitive job structure to the possible terrorist incidents,we took into consideration pharmaceutical sales representatives(PSRs).Frequent traveling to visit GPs and drugstores of their assigned zones increases their defenselessness to potential terrorist attacks.Its terrible history explains the choice of Pakistan as the site for the current research.Pakistan has been a sufferer of terrorism since 9/11 and has paid a staggering cost in the fight against this menace.Pakistan finds itself in a challenging geopolitical situation.On one side,there is the long-running Kashmir dispute with India,and on the other hand,the border with Afghanistan is not secure and subject to infiltration by Islamic militants such as the Taliban.Pakistan has had a terrorism problem since 1947.The residents of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province have endured nearly seventeen years(2001 to 2018)of nonstop and ongoing exposure to terrorism.The research has been divided into three distinctive parts.The first portion focuses on studying the direct impact of the perceived threat of terrorism,role stress and emotional exhaustion one the outcome variables of the study.The second part aims at investigating the mediating impact of role stress(role ambiguity and role conflict)between the relationship of perceived threat of terrorism and emotional exhaustion.Also,the portion constitute the study on the impact of the perceived threat of terrorism on field employees’ work engagement and production deviance by paying particular heed on their association with the mediating role played by emotional exhaustion.Whereas in third part physiological need was used as a moderator both on direct and indirect association between perceived threat of terrorism and work engagement via emotional exhaustion.Descriptive statistics of each part are elaborated in that particular chapter.The statistical analysis had been performed using the SPSS software package and process macro.Structural equation modeling technique had been performed for the analysis all studies.The results are presented and then discussed comprehensively.This research has opted the questionnaire survey method to gather empirical data.Following convenience sampling method data has been collected from the pharmaceuticals sales representatives(PSRs)male and female employees working in various organizations in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan.The companies were selected on the convenience basis,and the employees within them were chosen on the basis of simple random sampling.Considering the fact that English is an official language of Pakistan and has been taught in almost every school and college,we used questionnaire developed in English.The questionnaire instrument items of perceived threat of terrorism,role stress,emotional exhaustion,production deviance and work engagement were adapted from previous validated published studies.While we developed a questionnaire for the variable physiological need.Of forty-three questions,six were related to demographics,participants’ gender was self-reported and coded.Participants were asked to evaluate their agreement with the statements using a five-point Likert scale.From the results,there were found a positive correlation between the perceived threat of terrorism with role stress,emotional exhaustion,production deviance,and negative with work engagement among PSRs.The study found out that role stress provided a partial mediating impact between the perceived threat of terrorism and emotional exhaustion.The results also proved that emotional exhaustion had a mediating role between the relationship of the perceived threat of terrorism with production deviance and work engagement.In addition,findings suggest that physiological need moderated both direct and indirect effect of perceived threat of terrorism and work engagement through emotional exhaustion.Thus,the negative correlation between the perceived threat of terrorism and low work engagement is weakened with the higher the physiological need.The study adds to the literature by highlighting the importance of perceived threat of terrorism,role stress,emotional exhaustion,production deviance and work engagement among field employee functioning in highly terrorism volatile province of Pakistan.It also provides the insightful literature review on the topic,which presents the evolution in studying and its popular trends in the world.The further attention may be paid to the moderating role of physiological need in the current relationship.Moreover,the present study deepens the understanding of all endogenous variables used in the study both in the Pakistan as well as in terrorism context.The results contribute significantly to the existing knowledge of emotional focused coping by revealing the moderating effect of physiological need between the relationship of perceived threat of terrorism and work engagement.Grounding our research in Maslow motivation theory,we posited that physiological needs explain why PSRs enhance their work engagement,and how they become motivated to travel even in terrorism sensitive environment.Findings of present research also helped us identify cognitive bias in the cognitive appraisal process described in theory of psychological stress and coping;we realized there is a need to develop a new construct physiological need,which help in appraising appropriate coping strategy to satisfy the need.This thesis not only helps the further investigation into consequences of perceived threat of terrorism,but also highlights the importance of different theoretical models exploration for studying various aspects of field employee miseries in terrorism affected countries.The results of the current study should be of interest to researchers studying the phenomenon of employees’ coping with threat of terrorism in Pakistan and other high-risk countries.The topic is not only of interest to theory but also to the organizations,as more and more companies are extensively relaying on salespeople for their sales.Human resource managers and other top level of managers can get key insight from this study to develop such policies that may assist employee to better cope with demanding circumstances.Results,implications,recommendations for future investigation,and implications are discussed.