The Job Demands-Resources Model and Job Burnout: The Mediating Role of Personal Resources

The primary purpose of this study is to test whether the effect of workload on emotional exhaustion (health impairment process) and social support on depersonalization (motivation process) could be mediated by personal resources such as self-efficacy, self-esteem and optimism. Two multiple mediation models are tested separately, and then the point estimate and bias-corrected and accelerated 95 % confidence interval of the total and specific indirect effect are determined using the bootstrap approach with 1000 bootstrapped samples. The results show that workload positively affects emotional exhaustion, whereas social support negatively affects depersonalization, thus further corroborating the health impairment process and motivation process as assumed by the job demands-resources (JD-R) model. The total indirect effect is significant for both models, and self-esteem and optimism are the significant mediators for the health impairment process, whereas only optimism is the significant mediator for the motivation process.