LibRA: On LinkedIn based Role Ambiguity and Its Relationship with Wellbeing and Job Performance

Job roles serve as a boundary between an employee and an organization, and are often considered building blocks in understanding the behavior and functioning of organizational systems. However, a lack of clarity about one’s role, that is, one’s work responsibilities and degree of authority, can lead to absenteeism, turnover, dissatisfaction, stress, and lower workplace performance. This paper proposes a methodology to quantitatively estimate role ambiguity via unobtrusively gathered data from LinkedIn, shared voluntarily by a cohort of information workers spanning multiple organizations. After successfully validating this LinkedIn based measure of Role Ambiguity, or LibRA against a state-of-the-art gold standard, drawing upon theories in organizational psychology, we examine the efficacy and convergent validity of LibRA in explaining established relationships of role ambiguity with wellbeing and performance measures of individuals. We find that greater LibRA is associated with depleted wellbeing, such as increased heart rate, increased arousal, decreased sleep, and higher stress. In addition, greater LibRA is associated with lower job performance such as decreased organizational citizenship behavior and decreased individual task performance. We discuss how LibRA can help fill gaps in state-of-the-art assessments of role ambiguity, and the potential of this measure in building novel technology-mediated strategies to combat role ambiguity in organizations.