How empowering leadership influences medical workers' work–family conflict in the post-pandemic era: A moderated mediation model of leadership “black box”

Abstract

After experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, the status and mechanisms of leadership, and the challenges for medical workers in terms of family–work conflicts, have caused widespread concern. In the post-pandemic era, based on role theory and the stressor-detachment model, this paper seeks to break the “black box” of negative effects that can be caused by leadership, research the mechanism and boundary conditions of those negative effects, and explore factors to reduce those negative effects. We recruited 1,010 Chinese medical workers fighting COVID-19 on the frontline. Our study results showed that there was a significant negative correlation between empowering leadership and work–family conflict, and this relationship was completely mediated by role stress, while psychological detachment moderated the relationship between role stress and work–family conflict. Moreover, psychological detachment moderated the mediating effect of empowering leadership on work–family conflict through role stress. Therefore, higher levels of psychological detachment were less conducive to medical workers' family–work conflict. This study has important theoretical significance and practical value for revealing the negative effects and mechanisms of empowering leadership and for medical workers to better deal with work–family relations.

Prevalence and associated factors of depressive and anxiety symptoms among healthcare workers in the post-pandemic era of COVID-19 at a tertiary hospital in Shenzhen, China: A cross-sectional study

“…However, our study also showed that in the post-pandemic era, work-family conflict mainly positively affected anxiety symptoms, while job burnout positively affected depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and their co-occurrence. Our results suggest that actions can be go on to alleviate work-family conflict and job burnout to decrease mental health problems and enhance positive cognition in healthcare workers in the post-pandemic era ( 88 ). Moreover, in designing psychological intervention strategies during the post-epidemic era, more consideration can be given to starting from job burnout, which may have better effects and solve psychological problems more efficiently.…”

“…On the one hand, the workload and working hours of healthcare workers would fluctuate as the pandemic evolved, which was inevitable to bring negative effects to their family life ( 85 ) such as increased work-family conflict and thereby increased the level of anxiety symptoms ( 86 ). On the other hand, in the post-pandemic era of COVID-19, the uncertainty and variable conditions related to the pandemic can lead to role pressure for their families ( 87 ) and in the hospital and aggravate the severity of their work-family conflict ( 88 ). Healthcare workers' job burnout will not only reduce work efficiency and cause medical malpractices ( 89 ), but also increase the risk for depressive symptoms ( 90 ).…”