| Job stress is a problem in real life all employees may face and also one of a focus in the field of organizational behavior. Job stressor refers to the external stimuli cause pressure including workload, role conflict, relationship, working environment etc. The stimulation of job stressor will produce a series of reactions in physiology, psychology and behavior. Emotional exhaustion is one of the psychological reactions. Emotional exhaustion refers to feelings of being emotionally overextended and exhausted by one’s work.The way people communicate has drastically changed due to advances in communication technologies. Employees can have difficulty mentally distancing themselves from work during non-work time due to increasing use of communication technologies(e.g., e-mail, cell phone, wechat, etc.). We use the degree of psychological detachment to describe this phenomenon. Psychological detachment refers to a distraction from job-related thoughts during non-work time, one stops thinking about job-related problems or opportunities. It is not sufficient for one to change location by leaving the working place; one must also take a break from thinking about work-related issues. Job stressor may lead work to spill over from work to home domain, and employees have to think about or deal with work-related duties in the non-work time. It is undoubted that will further increase the likelihood of emotional exhaustion of employees.In the study of stress process, environment and individual differences are important factors. Stress is the result of interaction between the individual and the environment and arises when there is a conjunction between a particular kind of environment and a particular kind of person that leads to a threat appraisal. Self-efficacy is a significant factor in individual differences, it refers to a global confidence in one’s coping ability across a wide range of demanding or novel situations. Job stressor may predict psychological detachment, but there is no empirical research on whether there will be changes in the relationship between job stressor and psychological detachment after individuals in different level of self-efficacy evaluate the environment.Therefore, in the view of the above problems, based on the predecessors’ research, this study constructs the mediation path model of “job stressor-psychological detachment-emotional exhaustion”; and explores self-efficacy as a moderator in the relationship between job stressor and psychological detachment.This study collected data through questionnaire. First, 107 employees completed survey measures of job stressor, emotional exhaustion, psychological detachment and self-efficacy as a small ample survey to test the rationality of the design of the questionnaire. Then, 355 employees completed survey as a formal investigation. Control variables include gender, degree of education and the employee whether has to take care of the children. Deal with the data analysis by using SPSS 19.0 and AMOS 17.0, and then test the theoretical model. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) Job stressor could significantly predicts emotional exhaustion, that is, the higher job stressor is, the greater the possibility of emotional exhaustion.(2) Psychological detachment effect the relationship between job stressor and emotional exhaustion as a partial mediator. Analyses showed that high stressor was related to poor psychological detachment, poor psychological detachment in turn predicted high levels of emotional exhaustion.(3) Self-efficacy reverse moderates relationship between job stressor and psychological detachment, that is, compared with the staff who has low levels of self-efficacy, those who has high self-efficacy are more likely to show high psychological detachment.Theoretical values of this study are as follows:(1) Examining the job stressor as a predictor of emotional exhaustion(2) Recognizing the mechanism of the relationship between job stressor and emotional exhaustion: psychological as a partial mediator between the two.(3) Recognizing the contingency factors of job stressor-psychological detachment: self-efficacy as a reverse moderator between the two.Practical implications:(1) Employees should learn to detach from work, especially when facing job stressor. Employees might develop a specific hobby and talk about personal topics at home in case work-related requests intrude into private life.(2) Mangers should encourage employees to set a boundary between work and family and establish a segmentation norm in their work group, which could ensure their employees have opportunities to detach from work during off-work time.(3) Managers should pay attention to the levels of employees’ self-efficacy. They should communicate more frequently with those employees who have low self-efficacy, encourage them and help them strength their confidence in their work in order to impair the relationship between job stressor and psychological detachment. |
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