The relation of goal incongruence and self-control demands to indicators of job strain among elderly care nursing staff: a cross-sectional survey study combined with longitudinally assessed absence measures

Background: Formerly unconnected lines of research have shown that both the perceived incongruence between personal and organizational goals and meeting self-control demands at work exert adverse influences on indicators of job strain.

Objectives: Going beyond this research and drawing on recently developed theoretical notions on self-control depleting a limited control resource, the present study examines - in addition to main effects - also interactive effects of both stressors on various indicators of strain that include not only self-report measures (dimensions of burnout, psychosomatic complaints) but also absence data (sum of days absent, absence frequency) as behavioural outcome.

Design: A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted in combination with absence data referring to a time period of 12 months after administration of the questionnaires.

Setting: A municipal organization for residential elderly care with six nursing homes located in a large German city.

Participants: Questionnaires were distributed to the whole nursing staff of which 242 staff members filled in the questionnaire and permitted collecting their absence data (67% participation rate).

Methods: In addition to descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations, hierarchical moderated regression analyses were performed.

Results: Findings revealed significant main effects of both predictors on the criterion measures with signs corresponding to expectations. Over and above these main effects, the two-way interaction between goal incongruence and self-control demands added a significant amount of incremental variance to the prediction of exhaustion, depersonalization, psychosomatic complaints as well as the time lost index of absenteeism. In the measure of absence frequency, this interaction failed to reach significance. As hypothesized, the form of the interactions indicated that the adverse influences of self-control demands are strengthened with an increase in the perceived mismatch between personal and organizational goals.

Conclusions: Improving the fit between personal and organizational goals and strengthening the individual control resource could make health care workers less vulnerable against the depleting effects of meeting self-control demands at work.