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. 2025 Feb 27:17:63-73.
doi: 10.2147/JHL.S501193. eCollection 2025.

Managing Resilience and Exhaustion Among Health Care Workers Through Psychological Self-Care: The Impact of Job Autonomy in Interaction With Role Overload

Francis Maisonneuve  1 , Anaïs Galy  1 , Patrick Groulx  2 , Denis Chênevert  1 , Colleen Grady  3 , Angela M Coderre-Ball  3
Affiliations

Managing Resilience and Exhaustion Among Health Care Workers Through Psychological Self-Care: The Impact of Job Autonomy in Interaction With Role Overload

Francis Maisonneuve et al. J Healthc Leadersh. .

Abstract

Purpose: Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, we explore how job autonomy affects resilience and emotional exhaustion through psychological self-care (PSC). In addition, we study the impact of role overload as a boundary condition which dampens the beneficial effects of job autonomy.

Methods: Cross-sectional data was collected through an online survey among Canadian health care workers (HCWs) across multiple organizations. We performed structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the proposed hypotheses (N=860).

Results: Job autonomy had a positive relationship with resilience and negative with emotional exhaustion, both through PSC. However, high role overload hinders these relationships.

Conclusion: Job autonomy combined with reasonable workload allows HCWs to invest in themselves in the form of PSC, which in turn alleviates their emotional exhaustion and fosters their resilience. Accordingly, this helps HCWs in overcoming both current and future adverse events at work. Valuing autonomy and PSC through communication and contextualized human resource management practices will help support HCWs and health care organizations in turn. Indeed, nurturing resilience and reducing emotional exhaustion will provide and protect the needed individual resources to face future disruptive events, consequently leading to strengthen health care organizations.

Keywords: emotional exhaustion; job autonomy; psychological self-care; resilience; role overload.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Proposed theoretical model.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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