Abstract
Universities perform very demanding tasks within a workplace characterized by a critical psychosocial environment. Against this backdrop, the aim of this study is to extend the current literature on the job sustainability of faculty professors, examine the associations of certain job resources (meaningfulness of work, reward) and job demands (work overload, conflict among colleagues) with workaholism, burnout, engagement. A self-report questionnaire was administered within a public higher education institution in Italy to a sample constituted by 291 professors. The results of path analysis show that meaningfulness of work and reward positively correlate with work engagement, work satisfaction, and psychological wellbeing and ward off emotional exhaustion and intention to leave. Work overload correlates positively with workaholism, work-family conflict and intention to leave and negatively with job satisfaction. Finally, workaholism correlates with work engagement and mediates the relationship between work overload and work-family conflict, emotional exhaustion, and psychological discomfort. The study highlights that to support the work of academic workers and build healthy and sustainable universities, it is necessary to promote job resources and control job demands. Moreover, the study highlights that work engagement and workaholism can be respectively considered as the positive and negative sides of heavy work investment.
Highlights
The aim of this study is to extend the current literature on the job sustainability of faculty professors, examine the associations of certain job resources and job demands with workaholism, burnout, engagement
Our results confirm the existence of the process supposed by job demand-resources (JD-R) concerning motivation: job resources could lead to high work engagement and indirectly impact outcomes, such as job satisfaction, psychological wellbeing, and reduced intention to leave [29,88,90]
From the perspective of occupational psychological health in the frame of the job demands (JD)-R model, the study highlights that to support the work of academic workers and build healthy and sustainable universities, it is necessary to promote job resources, especially such traditional academic values [106] as autonomy, reward and meaningfulness of work, which indirectly sustain the work engagement of academic staff
Summary
As Innstrand et al (2015) affirm, universities are knowledge-intensive workplaces characterized by a critical psychosocial environment where the quality of knowledge development and transmission depends mainly on the teaching staff’s health and wellbeing. On this basis, healthy universities programs have recently been enhanced in Northern Europe and the UK, aimed at “improving health among students and staff, leading to institutional and societal productivity and sustainability” [1]. As several scholars have highlighted [9,10], the economic crisis that involved the entire planet in the last 15 years, rendering the situation of large layers of the population more fragile and precarious, has certainly exacerbated critical psychosocial issues in all organizational contexts, and even academic workplaces have most likely been subjected to these influences
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