Abstract
Globally, human service professionals, like social workers, experience significant job demands (JD) which can lead to outcomes like psychological distress, burnout, and high turnover rates. This is especially true in China, where the social work profession has grown substantially in recent decades. Because social workers play a crucial role in supporting vulnerable communities, there is a need to understand how their work conditions affect outcomes like psychological distress. This study applies the job demands and resources (JD-R) model to study this relation, along with the mediational effects of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA), in social workers from Chengdu, China (n = 897). The results of structural equation modeling indicate that JD-R differentially affect psychological distress. PA and NA partially mediate these relations. Job resources (JR) reduced psychological distress by reducing NA and increasing PA. JD did not have any effect on PA but significantly increased NA, which was associated with higher psychological distress. The magnitudes of each estimate suggest that JR has a greater effect on PA and NA, relative to the effects of JD on PA and NA. Interventions that seek to promote PA and reduce NA may be able to work with existing JR to buffer against the effects of JD in social workers.
Highlights
Industrialized economies have undergone a significant transformation in workforce structure in past decades, leading to greater job demands and work-related stress [1,2,3,4]
Further regression analysis suggests that the positive correlation between job demands (JD) and positive affect (PA) was driven by job resources (JR)
JR was positively associated with high PA and low negative affect (NA) (Hypotheses 3 and 4), which were both associated with psychological distress (Hypotheses 5 and 6)
Summary
Industrialized economies have undergone a significant transformation in workforce structure in past decades, leading to greater job demands and work-related stress [1,2,3,4]. Work-related stress is associated with a range of health-compromising behaviors which individuals may use to cope with or to manage stress [5,6,7] It is no surprise, that studies have shown that work-related stress is a significant risk factor of poorer physical [6, 8] and psychological health and well-being [3, 4, 6]. For example, experience a high degree of work-related stress and, have a greater risk of burnout [7, 10, 11] This stress is often associated with the emotional labor demands required of many who work human service jobs [10, 11]. The goal of this study is to apply the job demands and resources (JD-R) model to examine how job demands (JD) and job resources (JR) differentially affect psychological distress and whether these relations are parallelly mediated by positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in a sample of Chinese social workers
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