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The Job Demands-Resources Model and Job Burnout: The Mediating Role of Personal Resources

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Abstract

The primary purpose of this study is to test whether the effect of workload on emotional exhaustion (health impairment process) and social support on depersonalization (motivation process) could be mediated by personal resources such as self-efficacy, self-esteem and optimism. Two multiple mediation models are tested separately, and then the point estimate and bias-corrected and accelerated 95 % confidence interval of the total and specific indirect effect are determined using the bootstrap approach with 1000 bootstrapped samples. The results show that workload positively affects emotional exhaustion, whereas social support negatively affects depersonalization, thus further corroborating the health impairment process and motivation process as assumed by the job demands-resources (JD-R) model. The total indirect effect is significant for both models, and self-esteem and optimism are the significant mediators for the health impairment process, whereas only optimism is the significant mediator for the motivation process.

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Notes

  1. In model A, the indirect effect of workload on emotional exhaustion via self-efficacy is not significant, thus the multiple mediator analysis was re-ran using self-esteem and optimism as the mediators. The results shows that the total indirect effect (95 % CI = 0.0359, 0.0963; p < .05), as well as the specific indirect effects via self-esteem (95 % CI = 0.0178, 0.0673; p < .05) and optimism (95 % CI = 0.0088, 0.0516; p < .05), is significant, indicating that self-esteem and optimism are reliable mediators of the health impairment process. Similarly, in model B, the multiple mediator analysis using optimism as the mediator shows that the total indirect effect (which is also the specific indirect effect of optimism) is significant (95 % CI = −0.0761, −0.0206; p < .05), indicating that optimism is a reliable mediator of the motivational process. The results also indicate that deletion of insignificant mediators does not result in a significant decrease in the total indirect effects in both models.

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Correspondence to Xuqun You.

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This work is supported by the 2011 Key Projects of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research, Ministry of Education, under Grant No. 11JZD044.

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Huang, J., Wang, Y. & You, X. The Job Demands-Resources Model and Job Burnout: The Mediating Role of Personal Resources. Curr Psychol 35, 562–569 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-015-9321-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-015-9321-2

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