中華心理衛生協會

 Purpose: According to the conservation of resources theory, high job stress depletes workers' inner resources. With job stress, neither the person's work nor family role can obtain enough resources to meet expectations and responsibilities, resulting in a state of work-life imbalance that in turn affects job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and mental health. Individuals differ in their ability to successfully manage the boundary between work and life when under stress. Boundary management depends on the ability to switch roles and corresponding behaviors, and to simultaneously process or multitask different roles (polychronicity). We examined the critical individual characteristic of polychronicity to test the hypothesis that it reduces the harmful effect of workers' job stress on their work-life balance. We then examined its moderating role on the relationship between job stress and physical and mental health (quality of life, subjective well-being, and quality of sleep) as mediated by work-life balance. Methods: We collected a total of 323 valid questionnaires. Participants were full-time employees in Taiwan (mean age = 35.53 years, 69.3% women, 65% at the rank of general staff). We conducted confirmatory factor, correlation, and hierarchical regression analyses to test the research model and hypotheses. Results: Job stress had a significant negative correlation with work-life balance. Work-life balance had significant positive correlations with all 3 physical and mental health indicators. Greater polychronicity significantly reduced the negative effect of job stress on work-life balance. Analysis of the moderated mediation effect model indicated that greater polychronicity reduced the mediating effect of work-life balance between job stress and all 3 of the physical and mental health indicators. Conclusions: An employee's preference for polychronicity can reduce the consequences of job stress on work-life balance, which serves as a buffer for the negative effect of job stress on physical and mental health. This study provides support for the job demands-resources model, which states that both work and personal resources can effectively alleviate the health depletion process caused by job stress: personal resources are necessary in addition to external resources. This study demonstrates that polychronicity is one such personal resource in that it can effectively reduce the negative process and consequences of job stress.