How to Prevent Hostile Behaviors and Emotional Exhaustion among Law Enforcement Professionals: The Negative Spiral of Role Conflict.

The nature and characteristics of the current work environment of law enforcement professionals point out role-conflict situations as one of the main reasons leading to the occurrence of hostile behaviors and the worsening of employees' well-being. Precisely, this research analyzes the mediating role of role conflict between laissez-faire leadership and hostility or police professionals' emotional exhaustion. To mitigate the negative effects of role-conflict situations, the moderating role of certain personal resources such as self-efficacy, and organizational variables such as interactional justice, the meaning of the work and family-work enrichment is also analyzed. Structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis are used in a sample of 180 police professionals. The results show that role conflict fully and positively mediates the relationships between laissez-faire leadership and hostile behaviors or emotional exhaustion. Moreover, self-efficacy and interactional justice moderates the relationship between laissez-faire leadership and role conflict; the meaning of the work moderates the relationships between role conflict and hostile behaviors, and family-work enrichment moderates the relationship between role conflict and employees' emotional exhaustion. The huge relevance of the work of law enforcement professionals and its implications for society justify this research, which aims to highlight the importance of avoiding role-conflict situations to improve labor welfare and prevent counterproductive and unhealthy behaviors.

The role of emotional exhaustion among public healthcare professionals.

PURPOSE: The nature of public healthcare highlights not only the need of understanding the role of emotional exhaustion in the relationship between employees' job demands and desirable employees' job attitudes, but also to adequate the combination of certain job resources and other organisational variables to moderate the employees' feelings of emotional exhaustion. The paper aims to discuss this issue. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: This viewpoint designs the theoretical approach that aims to understand the mediating role of emotional exhaustion among healthcare professionals and the capacity of certain variables to moderate it. The nature of the variables considered and the design of the theoretical model proposed highlights structural equation modelling as an optimal methodology to be used among a sample of European healthcare professionals. FINDINGS: Managers should be able to design strategies to mitigate, eliminate and prevent the causes of emotional exhaustion in public healthcare with the objective to improve the health and quality of life of healthcare professionals, and consequently the quality of the service provided to patients and their families. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This viewpoint highlights the importance of analysing the influence of employees' emotional exhaustion on their attitudes in public healthcare. Direct relationships between emotional exhaustion and certain antecedents or consequences have been studied previously; however, studies analysing the mediating role of emotional exhaustion are very scarce and show mixed results. There are also few studies analysing the moderating role of certain job resources and other organisational variables in the relationships between employees' job demands, employees' emotional exhaustion and employees' job attitudes.