Managing Resilience and Exhaustion Among Health Care Workers Through Psychological Self-Care: The Impact of Job Autonomy in Interaction With Role Overload.

Abstract

Purpose: Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, we explore how job autonomy affects resilience and emotional exhaustion through psychological self-care (PSC). In addition, we study the impact of role overload as a boundary condition which dampens the beneficial effects of job autonomy.

Methods: Cross-sectional data was collected through an online survey among Canadian health care workers (HCWs) across multiple organizations. We performed structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the proposed hypotheses (N=860).

Results: Job autonomy had a positive relationship with resilience and negative with emotional exhaustion, both through PSC. However, high role overload hinders these relationships.

Conclusion: Job autonomy combined with reasonable workload allows HCWs to invest in themselves in the form of PSC, which in turn alleviates their emotional exhaustion and fosters their resilience. Accordingly, this helps HCWs in overcoming both current and future adverse events at work. Valuing autonomy and PSC through communication and contextualized human resource management practices will help support HCWs and health care organizations in turn. Indeed, nurturing resilience and reducing emotional exhaustion will provide and protect the needed individual resources to face future disruptive events, consequently leading to strengthen health care organizations.