Work-family relationship, burnout and health among shift working municipal police officers

Abstract

Nowadays the number of non-standard shift work systems increases. Shift work itself creates particular conditions for functioning of the family and could be the source of both: conflicts and crisis in professional, family and personal domains of worker’s life. Therefore it is necessary to find an effective way of balancing family and work life. The aim of this study is to present result of research of 90 married male municipal police officers. 86,5% of them had at least one child in the household. They were employed in slow and fast rotating shift work systems with respectively: 8- and 12-hour shifts. Means of age and work experience were 37,2 years (SD=7.1) and 10.7 years (SD=6.5). The research has focused on work/family and family/work facilitation and conflict (Work-Family Spillover, Grzywacz & Marks, 2000), burnout (Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey) and job satisfaction (Minnesota Job Satisfaction Questionnaire). In this study subjective health was measured with regard to digestive and cardiovascular symptoms. The research results show that exhaustion (important element of burnout) could be explained in a great proportion (R²=60%) by work/family conflict, work/family facilitation and family/work conflict. Among the three of them the strongest predictor of exhaustion is work/family conflict, described as negative job bearing on family life. Exhaustion leads to decrease of job satisfaction and decrease of subjective health and therefore the conflicts among the family and work roles could result in poorer health. The findings of this stuffy suggest that it is crucial for shift workers employed in non-standard shift work systems to balance work and family domains