Work-family conflicts, cognitive appraisal, and burnout: Testing the mediation effect with structural equationmodelling.

Clara Simães,Arminda Manuela Gonçalves,Jéssica Rodrigues,António Rui Gomes,Susana Faria

doi:10.1111/bjep.12420

Clara Simães, Arminda Manuela Gonçalves + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12420

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Abstract

Work-family conflict constitutes an important source of occupational stress predicting teachers' burnout, and cognitive variables have shown to be core structures in explaining human adaptation to stress. Nevertheless, the role of cognitive appraisal needs to be fully analysed to comprehend how it can mediate the relationship between stress and burnout. In order to understand the potential mediation of cognitive appraisal in the relationship between stress and burnout, we adopted conceptual models of stress that highlighted the value of cognitive appraisal on positive and negative reactions to work demands. Also, we analysed the potential moderation of sex and age in the relationship between work-family conflict, cognitive appraisal, and burnout due to inconsistent findings on how these personal variables can interfere on these relations. In this study, we used structural equationmodelling (SEM) to test the mediating of cognitive appraisal in the relationship between work-family conflicts and burnout. A survey with measures of work-family conflicts, cognitive appraisal, and burnout was administered to the participants consisting of 438 Portuguese teachers from kindergarten through high school, aged between 28 and 67 years (M = 46.85; SD = 7.88), 304 of whom were females (69.41%). The results confirmed that cognitive appraisal partially mediated the relationship between work-family conflict and burnout. The mediation effect of cognitive appraisal on the relationship between work-family conflict and burnout was invariant regardless of teachers' sex or age. In sum, cognitive appraisal should be considered in order to understand teachers' adaptation to work.

Highlights

Work-family conflict constitutes an important source of occupational stress predicting teachers’ burnout, and cognitive variables have shown to be core structures in explaining human adaptation to stress
Work-family conflicts encompasses “Work-to-Family Conflict” (WFC) and “Family-to-Work Conflict” (FWC), two distinct but related constructs that can be understood as a type of role conflict that happens when the demands from one domain are incompatible with the demands of the other domain (Byron, 2005)
Hypothesis 1 stated that primary cognitive appraisal and secondary cognitive appraisal would mediate the relationship between work-family conflicts and burnout

Summary

Introduction

Work-family conflict constitutes an important source of occupational stress predicting teachers’ burnout, and cognitive variables have shown to be core structures in explaining human adaptation to stress. The role of cognitive appraisal needs to be fully analysed to comprehend how it can mediate the relationship between stress and burnout. We analysed the potential moderation of sex and age in the relationship between workfamily conflict, cognitive appraisal, and burnout due inconsistent findings on how these personal variables can interfere on these relations. We used Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to test the mediating of cognitive appraisal in the relationship between work-family conflicts and burnout. The mediation effect of cognitive appraisal on the relationship between work-family conflict and burnout was invariant regardless of teachers’ sex or age. It is fundamental to determine how individuals appraise stress situations (primary cognitive appraisal) and their coping resources to deal with them (secondary cognitive appraisal) (Lazarus, 1991, 2006; Simães & Gomes, 2019)

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