The Relationship Between Work Stress And Mental Health:The Moderating Role Of Work Value

Under excessive work stress, employee showed more mental health problems, such as work burnout. A lot of models were proposed to disclose mental mechanism from work stress to work burnout. However, previous models (representative as job demands-resource model, JD-R) focused on the impact of job characteristics, such as job demand and job resources, but ignored the impact of personal resources. In fact, labors are active individuals who adapt themselves to work places rather than passive acceptors. Both the person-environment fit model and conservation of resources emphasized the impact of personal resources, this to say, personal resources as intrinsic characteristics of employees might play the moderating role similar to job resources as predicted by JD-R model. Previous empirical studies had examined the role of individual’s self-evaluation (e.g., self-efficacy, esteem and optimism) in JD-R model, but there is no research to integrate characteristic self-evaluation (e.g., work value) into JD-R model. As core component of personal resource, work value is basically accepted to guide behavior in the sense of professional goals people try to attain. This study aimed to integrate work value into JD-R model through examining how work value moderates association between job characteristics and mental health. In addition, the nursing profession is widely regarded as the profession with high work load and nurses showed more psychological problems compared with other populations. Because nurses are typical population of occupational health research, this study focused on the health of nurses.This study utilized cross-sectional design and questionnaire survey. Participants are 455 female nurses who were recruited from nine hospitals in Nanjing, China. They self-reported their job demand, job resources, work value and mental health with reliable scales. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was done for examining association between job demand, job resources and mental health and whether there is an interaction between job characteristics and work value in predicting mental health. Simple slope analysis was done for examining the moderating role of work value.The results revealed that job demand positively predicted somatic disorder, emotional exhaustion and cynicism, and negatively predicted personal accomplishment; job resources negatively predicted somatic disorder, emotional exhaustion and cynicism, and positively predicted personal accomplishment.This suggested that lower job demand and high job resources would decrease the occurrence of mental illness. The work value strengthened the negative association of job demand with mental health as well as the buffering role of job resources for the health-impairing impact of workload. Specially, the interaction between job demand and work value predicted mental health, this is to say, the interaction between work load and welfare and between work load and self-development negatively predicted emotional exhaustion and cynicism, the interaction between work load and interest negatively predicted cynicism; the interaction between interpersonal stress and self-development positively predicted somatic disorder; the interaction between work demand and self-development positively predicted personal accomplishment. The interaction between job resources and work value negatively predicted mental health, this is to say, the interaction between autonomy and welfare negatively predicted somatic disorder and the interaction between autonomy and self-development negatively predicted emotional cynicism; the interaction between work value and leadership support and between work value and job control negatively predicted somatic disorder.In conclusion, work value could moderate the relation between job characteristics and mental health. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical research to find the moderating role of work value as core component of personal resource. This may provide a new intervention to relieve the stress, motivate the workers and raise the nurses’ mental health level.