Personal and organizational antecedents of employees’ stress: differential analyses of the work family interplay
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Date
2013-02-27
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Abstract
In the field of psychology as well as business and social sciences, one of the most relevant questions is how employees stay healthy. The conflict between work and family roles has been identified as a key cause for the experience of stress in existing literature of the recent decades. Therefore, work-family conflict (WFC) has gained the most research attention in contrast to other variables of the work-family interplay. Nevertheless, there are some research questions that have not been answered yet. Three of these research gaps will be closed, each by one of the three studies of this dissertation:
The aim of Study I was to identify the impact of the variables of a classic occupational mental health model within the context of WFC and stress in order to identify the relevance of WFC for workplace health promotion. One of the most important mental health models is the effort-reward imbalance model. Based on a heterogeneous sample of 627 employees, results confirm overcommitment as a crucial predictor for internal WFC and irritation. Additionally, in contrast to classic stressors internal WFC was a strong predictor for employees’ stress. In Study II, data of 508 employees with informal family caregiving responsibilities of one organization were studied. Results showed that work-family culture was an important resource for reducing WFC and that health-related self-efficacy was a beneficial resource in reducing irritation. Furthermore, reciprocal effects between internal and external WFC and irritation were found. Within Study III, the personal resource resilience, which is the psychological resistance that enables people to develop even under bad circumstances, was investigated as a predictor of both WFC and balance, and a physiological predictor of stress. Participants of the study were 35 employed parents with children up to the age of six. Salivary cortisol was collected at three points on one day. Results showed that internal as well as external WFCs were related to the mean cortisol level and that resilience had a beneficial influence on the mean cortisol level. Moreover, resilience was also advantageous for the experience of work-family balance.
In sum, this dissertation highlights the importance of relevant but commonly seldom investigated key aspects of the relationship between work-family interplay and stress such as overcommitment, work-family culture, health-related self-efficacy and resilience. Thereby, significant starting points for theory- and evidence-based workplace health promotion were identified.
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Cortisol work - family balance, Effort reward imbalance, Health related self-efficacy, Resilience irritation, Stress, Work - family conflict