Job performance of women at work in rural India: Job demands-resources (JD-R) perspective

Abstract

Rural working women in India represent a highly potential but mainly underutilized human resource whose job performance has individual as well as community level ramifications. Difficult geographies that are characterized by difficult terrain, lack of resources and frequent disasters accentuates the complexity in the study of job performance. This study identified and tested the factors that affect job performance of these rural women workers in difficult geography to derive policy implications that could aid in enhancing their job performance. We structured our review on the frame of the JD-R (Demerouti et al., 2001) model and found significant gaps in the research schema that warrant inclusion and exclusion of other variables for proper contextualization. Our study covers the following aspects 1. Developing a job performance model based on JD-R approach using qualitative methods 2. Testing the subset of the job performance model using quantitative techniques 3. Deriving policy implications from the findings of the study In the first phase directed content analysis (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005) was done on relevant documents and transcribed interviews of 55 ASHAs and 5 focus group discussions; triangulation of the findings was done from other sources including interviews of 5 facilitators, 3 ANMs and 2 doctors working in rural villages. In the next phase, quantitative data was collected from multiple sources and analyzed using univariate, bivariate and multivariate techniques (structural equation modeling) after establishing the discriminant and convergent validity. In the last phase based on our understanding of the findings and expert analysis policy implications for enhancing job performance of ASHAs were recommended. One of the key theoretical contributions of the study is the augmentation of the existing JD-R model and the study of unique relationships of affective demands with other variables. The practical contribution has been in management of rural women worker in challenging geographies.