Attachment style as a moderator between various areas of worklife and burnout
LE3 .A278 2016
2016
Leiter, Michael
Acadia University
Bachelor of Science
Honours
Psychology
Attachment theory is a developing area of research in the industrial organizational psychology field. The relationships of burnout and areas of worklife have been well established in decades past (Maslach & Leiter, 1997, 2008). The application of attachment theory offers the perspective of examining individual differences pertaining to interpersonal relationships and coping with stressful circumstances in the workplace (Harms, 2011). A survey of health care workers (N= 1902) was conducted by the Center forOrganizational Research and Development at Acadia University. A moderation technique was used to analyze the predictive power of attachment style as a moderator of the relationships between the three most social areas of worklife and burnout. Despite the lack of significance of analyses regarding the exhaustion and cynicism dimensions of burnout, four of the six hypotheses regarding the professional efficacy dimension of burnout proved to be significant. The confirmation of four significant interactions provides valuable evidence as to how individual factors can suppress the relationship between areas of worklife and the professional efficacy dimension of burnout. Future research should examine other populations of workers to see if any of the patterns found in this study are generalizable to other populations. Furthermore, focusing on the stability of the construct of attachment at work over time and across settings would also be useful.
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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:1417
