Associations between occupational and leisure time physical activity and employee stress, burnout, and well-being among workers in the health care industry

https://doi.org/10.1177/08901171211011372

Commentary

This study examined the association of occupational and leisure time physical activity with job stress, burnout, and well-being among workers in the health care industry.

Subjects were 550 individuals from Amazon Mechanical Turk in the United States who were employed in the health care industry, worked at least 35 hours per week, had at least one supervisor and at least one coworker, and were at least 18 years old. Participants were assessed on self-reported measures of occupational physical activity (OPA) and leisure time physical activity (LTPA), employee well-being, job stress, and burnout in separate multiple linear regression models.

Results showed that OPA was positively and significantly associated with job stress (β = .10, P-value = .003) and malaise (β = .21, P-value < .0001), with no significant associations between OPA and other psychological outcomes.

There was also a significant inverse association between LTPA and malaise (β= -0.04, P-value = .007). Thus, findings from a survey of U.S. health care professionals reported that higher LTPA was associated with lower fatigue and higher OPA was associated with higher perceptions of work stress and fatigue.

Limitations of this result are that it is a cross-sectional model, so it does not show a causal relationship between the independent and dependent variables, it is self-reported and may introduce recall bias, and it may not be representative of the US working population due to the higher education level of the participants.