Workload, Work-Life Conflict, and Stress Amongst Mental Health Professionals: The Moderating Role of Segmentation Preference.

The nature of the mental health profession inherently puts its workers at risk of heightened psychological stress. This raises the importance of understanding why some mental health professionals show greater resilience when faced with common work stressors than others. One work stressor that has been consistently linked with stress is workload. Research has found that higher workload generally leads to greater work-life conflict, which, in turn, leads to greater stress. The current study aimed to test this mediation model amongst mental health professionals and examined how individuals' preference for segmentation versus integration of work and private life moderates the strength of the pathways in this mediation model. Research participants, consisting of 152 Australian mental health professionals aged 18-69 years (M = 37.58, SD = 12.12), voluntarily completed a 30-min survey capturing workload, work-life conflict, segmentation preference, and stress. In line with expectations, higher workload predicted greater stress via higher levels of work-life conflict. Furthermore, segmentation preference moderated the path between workload and work-life conflict as well as the path between work-life conflict and stress. Simple slopes analyses showed that a stronger (vs. weaker) preference for segmentation was associated with a stronger positive relationship between workload and work-life conflict as well as a stronger positive relationship between work-life conflict and stress. Segmentation preference may thus influence the workload-work-life conflict-stress relationship through two distinct mechanisms. Improving our understanding of such mechanisms facilitates creation of targeted strategies to reduce work-induced stress amongst mental health professionals.