Job Anxiety among Bank Employees
INTRODUCTIONThe Indian economy is the fourth largest economy in the world on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and service sector forms the back bone of Indian economy, as 68.6 percent of the overall average growth in gross domestic product (GDP) between the years 2002 03 and 2006 07 has been contributed by service sector. After health and education, banking sector forms the largest service sector in India. It is imperative to note that without a sound and efficiently functioning banking system, the economy cannot function efficiently (Bala Kumar, 2011) Banks in India operate under the guidelines of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and can be categorized into scheduled commercial banks and cooperative credit institutions (Goyal Joshi, 2012) Scheduled commercial banks could be further categorized into public sector bank, private sector bank and foreign banks. There are currently 27 public sector banks in India. They include the SBI and its 6 associate banks, such as, State Bank of Indore, State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur etc, 19 nationalized banks, such as, Allahabad Bank, Canara Bank etc and IDBI Bank Ltd. In India 7 new and 15 old private sector banks were operating by the end of March, 2009 (Roy Kaveri, 2010) Few years back a report of McKinsey (McKinsey Co. 2007) painted a very optimistic picture of Indian banking sector for its rapid growth, competitiveness and comparable global best practices in various areas and predicted that the availability of greater growth opportunities in future is likely to fuel the growth of Indian banking sector further. However, just after four years the McKinsey projections need a relook amidst the tightening economic indicators, continuously poor performance of Indian rupee against dollar and regularly depreciating GDP growth among other worsening economic indicators. Surprisingly, all of the dimensions of performance assessment of Indian banks used in the McKinsey report were financial, viz. return on shareholder value, fostering financial inclusion, contribution to GDP growth, efficient management of intermediation cost, ability to effectively allocate capital and maintaining stability. The report did not emphasize much on the human factor, viz. impact of job anxiety among its employees, role of consumer satisfaction and consumer happiness.It is found that a happy and loyal employee develops closeness with customers which leads to organizational excellence (Peters Waterman, 1982; Collins Porras, 1997) In banking sector, the entire business process and profits are contributed by its employees. It is evident that unhealthy and anxious mental state of an employee might result in a number of organizational and psychological problems and is instrumental in development of job anxiety.Job anxiety refers to employee's predisposition to emotional tension caused by his generalized feelings of fear and insecurity and apprehensions in respect to one or several constituents of his job life. The psychological component of jobanxiety are fear, apprehension, self abasement, feeling of insecurity and pessimism in relation to various job components, such as, steadiness of employment and safety, managerial treatment, reward and punishment, future prospects in job and selfesteem, capacity to work and shouldering responsibilities etc. Both high and low job anxiety have negative effect on employee's mental state. High job anxiety has deleterious effect on employee's job satisfaction. Demand of wage revision and security and safety aspects of job life lead towards low job anxiety (Srivastava, 1974) Keeping in view the significance of job anxiety in modern industrial world, it has become obligatory to understand the concept of job anxiety from the perspective of banking sector.In the present scenario, women are equally participating in every field of life (Issac, Malavey Karras, 2006) Females are aspiring to shoulder the economic burden of the family by opting careers in different fields.