Abstract
Employees in female-dominated sectors are exposed to high workloads, emotional job demands, and role ambiguity, and often have insufficient resources to deal with these demands. This imbalance causes strain, threatening employees’ work ability. The aim of this study was to examine whether resource-providing leadership at the workplace level buffers against the negative repercussions of these job demands on work ability. Employees (N = 2383) from 290 work groups across three countries (Germany, Finland, and Sweden) in female-dominated sectors were asked to complete questionnaires in this study. Employees rated their immediate supervisor’s resource-providing leadership and also self-reported their work ability, role ambiguity, workload, and emotional demands. Multilevel modeling was performed to predict individual work ability with job demands as employee-level predictors, and leadership as a group-level predictor. Work ability was poor when employees reported high workloads, high role ambiguity, and high emotional demands. Resource-providing leadership at the group level had a positive impact on employees’ work ability. We observed a cross-level interaction between emotional demands and resource-providing leadership. We conclude that resource-providing leadership buffers against the repercussions of emotional demands for the work ability of employees in female-dominated sectors; however, it is not influential in dealing with workload or role ambiguity.
Highlights
Work-related stress, sick leave, and work incapacity due to poor mental health have increased [1,2,3,4] and become a serious societal problem worldwide [2,5]
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Summary
Work-related stress, sick leave, and work incapacity due to poor mental health have increased [1,2,3,4] and become a serious societal problem worldwide [2,5]. Risk groups for poor work-related mental health can be found in certain sectors [6,7,8], such as the public sector, where human service occupations (e.g., health care, social services, and education) dominate [9,10,11]. These sectors are often referred to as female-dominated sectors. A recent report highlighted that certain work demands involving unclear goals, such as a lack of goal clarity or role
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