Work family balance, stress, and salivary cortisol in men and women academic physicians

Abstract

With increasing responsibility at home, women and men reacted differently with regard to cortisol responses over the day. However, in the evening, controlling for the morning cortisol, these gender differences were not as obvious. These findings highlight traditional gender patterns among both women and men physicians in the challenge of finding a balance between work and family.

Work-Family Conflict among Junior Physicians: Its Mediating Role in the Relationship between Role Overload and Emotional Exhaustion

“…The significant relationship between work-family conflict and emotional exhaustion indicate that physicians who experience greater conflict resulting from performing both work and family roles tend to experience greater emotional exhaustion. Similar results were obtained by (Ray and Miller, 1994;Baron and Kenny, 1986a;Bergman et al, 2008;Fu and Shaffer, 2001;Houkes et al, 2003).…”

“…A study by Burke and Greenglass (2001) and Sweeney and Summers (2002) on nursing staff during hospital restructuring has shown that increased job burnout is an important consequence of work-family conflict. A longitudinal study of individuals from eight occupational groups including physicians revealed that increased levels of work-family conflict results in higher levels of burnout including emotional exhaustion (Baron and Kenny, 1986a;Bergman et al, 2008). Similar results have been reported by Peiro et al (2001) (Fu and Shaffer, 2001) among health care professionals, Lingard and Francis (2006) and Ray and Miller (1994) among construction professionals and managers, as well as Montgomery et al (2003) and Houkes et al (2003) in their study on newspaper managers.…”

“…Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) and Kahn et al (1964) conceptualized work-family conflict as a form of interrole conflict in which the role pressures from the work and family domains are mutually incompatible, such that participation in one role makes it more difficult to participate in the other. The experience of work-family conflict among professionals including physicians have been reported by researchers (Ray and Miller, 1994;Baron and Kenny, 1986a;Bergman et al, 2008). Acknowledging the experience of work-family conflict among physicians, several researchers have studied reduced workload as a condition that could reduce the conflict (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985;Lingard and Francis, 2006) while other researchers have studied the consequences of the conflict including emotional exhaustion (Innstrand et al, 2008;Baron and Kenny, 1986a;Bergman et al, 2008;Fu and Shaffer, 2001).…”

“…A study on gender differences in workload among professionals has shown that men spent more time in professional work and women more time in childcare and women perceived themselves as responsible for childcare activities at home (Bergman et al, 2008). This illustrates that apart from paid work, female physicians are mainly responsible for unpaid work at home and thus carried a double workload.…”

“…The recognition of negative psychological consequences of emotional exhaustion has directed attention towards the role of contributing factors such as appropriate workload and reduced workfamily conflict in addressing the problem of emotional exhaustion experienced by employees. Although previous studies have reported the effects of role overload (Chopra et al, 2004;Innstrand et al, 2008;Piesah et al, 2009;Maslach et al, 2001) and workfamily conflict (Innstrand et al, 2008;Baron and Kenny, 1986a;Bergman et al, 2008;Fu and Shaffer, 2001) and their interactions with other variables on emotional exhaustion, the use of a model for understanding the mediating impact of work-family conflict on the relationship between the role overload as a stressor and emotional exhaustion as a consequence has not been given much attention.…”