Boundary role ambiguity: Facets, determinants, and impacts.

The study of the organizational determinants of role ambiguity among sales and marketing professionals and its dysfunctional impact on job outcomes is an important area of research in marketing. Recently, researchers have identified several gaps in the literature in this area, including (1) substantial variability in results across studies and (2) lack of studies that conceptualize (and operationalize) role ambiguity as a multifaceted construct. As an initial step, the author uses a multifaceted conceptualization of role ambiguity to investigate a model that includes key organizational determinants and job outcomes. Using data from multiple samples of sales and marketing professionals, the author estimates, augments, and validates the hypothesized model. The results show that multifaceted role ambiguity (1) helps uncover functional facets of role ambiguity (e.g., family) that facilitate coping with other ambiguous facets, (2) unravels the sensitivity of role ambiguity facets to different organizational determinants, and (3) offers evidence of differential potency because the different role ambiguity facets exhibit different potency in predicting the various job outcomes. Several directions for enriching theory about the role ambiguity phenomenon are provided and implications for practitioners are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]