Professional work load and work-to-school conflict in working students: The mediating effect of psychological detachment from work

Abstract

In recent years there Portuguese higher education institutions have been aiming to attract more people to the educational system that are either in the labor market by offering evening and weekend graduate academic programs. Blending work and school is a demanding task and, so far, at the country level this phenomenon has received relatively little empirical attention. The purpose of the study is to build on existing work‐to-school conflict literature and to explore a possible relationship between professional work load on work-to-school conflicts among working students enrolled in a master program. Moreover we test the role of psychological detachment from work as mediator in this process. This model was tested, through path analysis, using 152 working students, 88 women and 64 men, enrolled as fulltime students in evening and weekend master programs.. The model showed an adequate fit to the data, suggesting that the influence of professional work load on work-to-school conflict is fully mediated by psychological detachment from work. These findings unveil a new perspective on working students enrolled in postgraduate school, pointing out the importance of psychological detachment from work to a better understand the impact of blending work and school. Contributions to the work-school literature, future research directions, and limitations of the study are discussed.