Work-Family Conflict among Junior Physicians: Its Mediating Role in the Relationship between Role Overload and Emotional Exhaustion
Abstract
Problem statement: The use of a mediation model for understanding the mediating impact of work-family conflict on the relationship between role overload and emotional exhaustion has not been given much attention. Approach: This study tested a mediation model consisting of emotional exhaustion as the dependent variable and role overload as the independent variable, with work-family conflict as its mediator. Data were gathered from a sample of 220 female junior physicians aged 40 years and below, having at least one child as well as working full-time in 14 public hospitals in Malaysia, using self-administered questionnaires. The data were analyzed using correlation and multiple regression analyses. Results: Results of correlation analyses revealed that role overload was significantly related to work-family conflict and emotional exhaustion and work-family conflict was significantly related to emotional exhaustion. Results of a series of multiple regression analyzed indicated that work-family conflict partially mediated the relationship between role overload and emotional exhaustion. Conclusion/Recommendations: Junior physicians who experience role overload seem to be more emotionally drained and seem to experience greater conflict between work and family roles. There is a need to reduce the role overload that physicians experience by reviewing the ratio between physicians and patients and re-assessing the number of work hours and the weekly frequency of on-calls. Limiting on-call frequency and hours may be more likely to reduce work-family conflict as well as emotional exhaustion.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3844/jssp.2010.265.271
Copyright: © 2010 Aminah Ahmad. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Keywords
- Work-family conflict
- role overload
- emotional exhaustion
- junior physicians