Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2024 Mar 27;24(1):907.
doi: 10.1186/s12889-024-18430-z.

Job boredom as an antecedent of four states of mental health: life satisfaction, positive functioning, anxiety, and depression symptoms among young employees - a latent change score approach

Jie Li  1   2 , Janne Kaltiainen  3 , Jari J Hakanen  3
Affiliations

Job boredom as an antecedent of four states of mental health: life satisfaction, positive functioning, anxiety, and depression symptoms among young employees - a latent change score approach

Jie Li et al. BMC Public Health. .

Abstract

Background: Job boredom has been generally associated with poorer self-rated health but the evidence is mainly cross-sectional and there is a lack of a holistic mental health approach. We examined the temporal relationships between job boredom and mental health indicators of life satisfaction, positive functioning, anxiety, and depression symptoms.

Methods: We analyzed a two-wave postal survey data of adults aged 23 to 34 that was collected from the Finnish working population between 2021 and 2022 (n = 513). Latent change score modelling was used to estimate the effects of prior levels of job boredom on subsequent changes in mental health indicators, and of prior levels of mental health indicators on subsequent changes in job boredom.

Results: Job boredom was associated with subsequent decreases in life satisfaction and positive functioning and increases in anxiety and depression symptoms. Of these associations, job boredom was more strongly associated with changes in positive functioning and anxiety symptoms than with changes in life satisfaction.

Conclusions: Our two-wave study suggests that job boredom, a motivational state of ill-being in the work domain, spills over into general mental health by decreasing life satisfaction and positive functioning and increasing anxiety and depression symptoms. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the potential detrimental effects of job boredom and its nomological network. From a practical perspective, workplaces are adviced to improve working conditions that mitigate job boredom and thus promote employees' mental health.

Keywords: Anxiety; Depression; Job Boredom; Latent Change Score Modelling; Life Satisfaction; Positive Mental Health.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Standardized path estimates of the reciprocal model (Model 4; n = 513). Note. For the sake of parsimony, the following estimates were omitted from the figure: 1) the significant autoregressive paths for job boredom, life satisfaction, positive functioning, anxiety, and depression symptoms, 2) the non-significant estimates of T1 life satisfaction, positive functioning, anxiety, and depression symptoms to ΔT1-T2 job boredom, 3) the non-significant estimates of job transition
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Harju L, Hakanen JJ, Schaufeli WB. Job boredom and its correlates in 87 Finnish organizations. J Occup Environ Med. 2014;56(9):911–918. doi: 10.1097/JOM.0000000000000248. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Harju LK, Hakanen JJ. An employee who was not there: a study of job boredom in white-collar work. Pers Rev. 2016;45(2):374–391. doi: 10.1108/PR-05-2015-0125. - DOI
    1. Kaltiainen J, Hakanen J. Changes in occupational well-being during COVID-19: the impact of age, gender, education, living alone, and telework in a Finnish four-wave population sample. Scand J Work Environ Health. 2022;48(6):457–67. doi: 10.5271/sjweh.4033. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Collaborators GMD. Global, regional, and national burden of 12 mental disorders in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. The Lancet Psychiatry. 2022;9(2):137–150. doi: 10.1016/S2215-0366(21)00395-3. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Kela. Kelan sairausvakuutustilasto 2021. Kela: Suomen virallinen tilasto; 2022. URN:NBN:fi-fe2022092660160. https://helda.helsinki.fi/items/4535c63d-37bd-467a-8d56-5c5150113f59.

LinkOut - more resources