Research On The Impact Of The Fear Of Terror On Employees' Strain Outcomes

Terrorism and its related fear are an unpredictable and unavoidable phenomenon of today's life.Employers and organizations may be able to provide their employees with excellent facilities and a workable environment,but they cannot guarantee their employees freedom from terrorism and its fear.The hottest events of terrorism around the world,such as the attack on the Army Public School Peshawar Pakistan in 2014,the Paris Terror Attacks of 2015,the Manchester Arena in London in 2017 and the latest 2019 terror attacks on the Christchurch mosques in New Zealand are some of the examples.These examples clearly show that the acts of terrorism are not restricted to any traditional hot spot,which can cause intense fear and stress in those individuals who are exposed to them.Living under constant threat and fear can be extremely stressful for those employees who live in vulnerable areas and works in terrorism affected organizations.Hence,they must deal with an increased risk of terrorism,its stress,and fear in their personal and professional life.Rising terrorist attacks around the globe have seriously deteriorated the individual quality of life in general and health well-being in particular.However,scant research has been done on this phenomenon to date.By considering the negative impacts of terrorism and the resulting fear on individual well-being,this study has examined the relations among the fear of terror(FOT),terrorism-induced stress(TIS),personal burnout(PB),psychological well-being(PWB),absenteeism and emotional intelligence(EI).This research was,therefore,conducted with three main objectives: a)To check the direct impact of the fear of terror on the study outcome variables of personal burnout,psychological well-being,and absenteeism.b)To check the indirect effect of fear of terror on personal burnout,psychological well-being,and absenteeism mediated by terrorisminduced stress.c)To empirically find out whether employees' emotional intelligence moderates the association between the fear of terror and personal burnout,absenteeism as well as psychological well-being.Pakistan,a developing country in South Asia,was the setting for this study,which has been badly suffered from intense episodes of on-going terrorism.For this purpose,data were collected in April-August,2017 from 413 employees in the education sector.Due to time,cost and accessibility constraints,we applied convenient-sampling techniques.Participants were approached through online and personal means by sending them a self-reported structured questionnaire to fill.These employees work in province of Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa(KPK)in Pakistan.The aim of focusing on these two provinces was that they have a particularly high incidence of terrorism-affected settings around the world.The reason behind such relevance is that they share their borders with Afghanistan and have experienced the thrilling terrorism episodes since 9/11.It has been reported that Pakistan lost more than 70,000 civilians and an estimated $252 billion loss to their economy up to 2017-2018 as a result of the US “war on terror.” This research has been challenging in many ways,and the researcher encountered different types of barriers to those presented by general management studies.Such as conducting a research survey in a region where the chance of risk to life from terrorism is a concrete reality.Despite the potential risk of terrorism and specified challenges,it was not possible to ignore gaps in the literature and the practical need for the research.The theoretical framework of the study was developed based on previous literature studies,stress transactional model by Lazarus and Folkman,and the conservation of resource theory by Hobfoll.The research suggested that when employees are fearful about the potential acts of terrorism.It increased their level of stress,which in turn leads to a state of physical and psychological resource loss or strain,for example,the low level of psychological well-being,increased level of absenteeism and personal burnout.Next,by drawing form the conservation of resource protection mechanism,this study utilizes the individual personal psychological resources of emotional intelligence and suggest that employees with higher psychological resources experience little strain or resource depletion.Therefore,they are easily able to cope with an excessive fear of terror/stressor by utilizing their extra resource reserves.Analysis of the study was done with the help of SPSS and AMOS(version 23).Confirmatory factor analysis(CFA)was carried out to check the model fineness and the study proposed hypothesis was tested by applying structural equation modeling(SEM)through AMOS 23.00.Results of the study revealed that fear of terror has a direct positive impact on terrorism-induced stress,absenteeism,personal burnout,and psychological well-being.It has been noted that terrorism-induced stress partially mediated the relationship between the fear of terror and employees' absenteeism,personal burnout and psychological well-being.Results further showed that emotional intelligence has significantly moderated the association between fear of terror and psychological wellbeing as well as personal burnout,while insignificant between fear of terror and absenteeism.Thus,accepting all the study proposed hypothesis except the moderating role of emotional intelligence in the relationship between fear of terror and absenteeism which was rejected by the study results.Prior research shows that the fear of terror has been relatively overlooked in the organizational context,and only a small number of studies have examined the impact of the fear of terror on employees' strain.Considering the scare literature on terrorism fear and employees' strain response,this study contributes to the literature in different ways: First by exploring the relationship among the fear of terror,employees' personal burnout,psychological well-being,and absenteeism.Second,by checking the mediating role of terrorism-induced stress on the relationship among the fear of terror and personal burnout,psychological well-being,and absenteeism.Third this study has theoretically contributed to the current literature by checking the important moderating role of emotional intelligence in the relationship between fear of terror and personal burnout,absenteeism as well as psychological well-being.The findings of the study provided important practical implications for managers and supervisors working in terrorism-affected areas.The mere acknowledgment of the fact that fear of terrorism can reduce employee wellbeing,increase their level of personal burnout and absenteeism should be sufficient for the management to take practical steps in order to reduce if not eliminate the adverse effect of such fear.It would be of great value for educational sector employees to engage them in activities organized by their organization aimed at reducing their fear of being affected by terrorism and subsequently reducing their stress and its adverse impacts on their well-being.Furthermore,enhancement of the individual's level of emotional intelligence could play a significant role in reducing the adverse impact of terrorism fear on their personal outcomes.Future studies may focus on other sectors employees such as law enforcement,industries,and expatriates because these employees are also affected by terrorism.Moreover,it would be useful if future studies analyze some other possible mediating factors such as job-related anxiety,depression and moderating factors such as social support,mindfulness,and self-efficacy on the relationship between the fear of terror and employee strain.