INSPIRED but Tired: How Medical Faculty’s Job Demands and Resources Lead to Engagement, Work-Life Conflict, and Burnout

Abstract

BackgroundPast research shows that physicians experience high ill-being (i.e., work-life conflict, stress, burnout) but also high well-being (i.e., job satisfaction, engagement).ObjectiveTo shed light on how medical faculty’s experiences of their job demands and job resources might differentially affect their ill-being and their well-being with special attention to the role that the work-life interface plays in these processes.MethodsQualitative thematic analysis was used to analyze interviews from 30 medical faculty (19 women, 11 men, average tenure 13.36 years) at a top research hospital in Canada.FindingsMedical faculty’s experiences of work-life conflict were severe. Faculty’s job demands had coalescing (i.e., interactive) effects on their stress, work-life conflict, and exhaustion. Although supportive job resources (e.g., coworker support) helped to mitigate the negative effects of job demands, stimulating job resources (e.g., challenging work) contributed to greater work-life conflict, stress, and exhaustion. Thus, for these medical faculty job resources play a dual-role for work-life conflict. Moreover, although faculty experienced high emotional exhaustion, they did not experience the other components of burnout (i.e., reduced self-efficacy, and depersonalization). Some faculty engaged in cognitive reappraisal strategies to mitigate their experiences of work-life conflict and its harmful consequences.ConclusionThis study suggests that the precise nature and effects of job demands and job resources may be more complex than current research suggests. Hospital leadership should work to lessen unnecessary job demands, increase supportive job resources, recognize all aspects of job performance, and, given faculty’s high levels of work engagement, encourage a climate that fosters work-life balance.

Factors Associated With Burnout, Post-traumatic Stress and Anxio-Depressive Symptoms in Healthcare Workers 3 Months Into the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Observational Study

“…Conversely, high resilience, social support and availability of protective equipment are associated with lower levels of anxiety, burnout and insomnia (21,56,57). Additionally, past crises that generated important sources of strain for healthcare workers have shown the importance of verifying the impact of not only individual factors but also organizational ones on the development of burnout and psychopathologies (58)(59)(60). This proved to be the case in our study with higher resilience (individual factor) and perceived organizational support (organizational factor) being the only two variables significantly associated with better outcomes in both burnout and psychopathologies (PTSD, anxiety, depression), out of the eight independent variables verified.…”

Operational Constraints and Gender Biases: A Qualitative Analysis of Physician Parenting Experiences

“…One of the most commonly included requests among our respondents was for flexibility with clinic scheduling and committee meetings—a suggestion also echoed by Lee et al in their work evaluating work-life balance and conflict among medical faculty. 25 While Lee et al collected responses until saturation was met, our study welcomed reiteration of themes, with frequency of mention perhaps strengthening how widely felt or how important these work factors may be to physicians when it comes to better optimizing work-life balance. Measures for improvement such as flexibility with clinic scheduling grids and committee meeting times will require leadership buy-in, which will be challenging given the current financial challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

“…Additional strengths of our study include sample selection and survey methods that optimally captured diverse experiences and perceptions to enhance generalizability. Collecting data through an electronic survey as opposed to structured verbal interviews as done in similar qualitative studies 21 , 25 and sampling all physician faculty at a large academic health system encouraged a large sample size, minimized researcher-driven sampling bias, and included broader demographic representation of factors that may potentially influence the experience of parenting as a physician, such as years of experience as a faculty member, number of children, partner status, partner's work status, specialty, and full-time equivalent status.…”

Linking paternalistic leadership to work engagement among Chinese expatriates: a job demand-resource perspective

“…Individuals with abundant personal resources feel capable of meeting various needs and are more comfortable in demanding environments. In a cross-cultural context, employees can use resources to alleviate the negative impacts of high job demands (Lee et al, 2021). The JD-R model predicts that the interaction between job resource and demands affects employee motivation and stress (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017), suggesting that personal or job resources moderate the relationship between job demands and burnout or work engagement (Xanthopoulou et al, 2007).…”

“…Several studies stress the importance of job resources (e.g. leader support, autonomy, job security) in reducing work–family conflict (WFC) and promoting employee work engagement (Lee et al , 2021; Öge et al , 2018). The job demand-resource (JD-R) model, a major theoretical perspective in occupational health studies, is widely used in work engagement research, typically to study the antecedents of work engagement and job resources' roles, among which leadership behavior is crucial for employee work engagement.…”