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Associations between overcommitment, effort–reward imbalance and mental health: findings from a longitudinal study

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Abstract

Purpose

The effort–reward imbalance (ERI) model includes extrinsic and intrinsic aspects of work stress. The single components, ERI and overcommitment (OC), are known to be associated with mental health. The aim of this study was to test whether OC is a mediator of the association between ERI and mental health.

Methods

Longitudinal analyses were conducted using data from the Third German Sociomedical Panel of Employees on German employees aged 40–54 years. The short version of the ERI questionnaire was used to measure ERI and OC at baseline (2013). Outcomes were mental health problems and self-rated mental health (5-Item Mental Health Inventory) in 2015. Multivariate regressions were conducted controlling for sociodemographics, health-related behaviour, job-related aspects, and mental health at baseline.

Results

A total of 912 men and 1148 women were included in the final analysis. Baseline OC was positively associated with follow-up mental health problems and negatively with self-rated follow-up mental health. While there was no direct effect of ERI on mental health, ERI affected mental health problems (b = 0.14; 95% CI 0.03 to 0.25) and self-rated mental health (b = − 1.15; 95% CI − 1.79 to − 0.57) indirectly through OC.

Conclusions

OC was associated with reduced mental health. There was no association between ERI and mental health that was independent of OC. OC could therefore be interpreted as a mediator between ERI and mental health. Future studies are needed to test the causality of this association.

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Abbreviations

BCa CI:

Bias-corrected bootstrap confidence interval

BMI:

Body mass index

ERI:

Effort–reward imbalance

ERR:

Effort–reward ratio

GSPE-III:

Third German Sociomedical Panel of Employees

OC:

Overcommitment

SF-36:

36-item Short Form Health Survey

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Funding

This research was funded by the Federal German Pension Insurance Agency. The funders were not involved in the study design, the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data, the writing of the report, nor the decision to submit the paper for publication.

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Correspondence to Dorothea Margarete Hinsch.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

The study was approved by the ethics committee at Hannover Medical School (1730–2013) and the data protection commissioner of the German Pension Insurance Agency. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Informed consent was obtained from all participants included in the study.

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Hinsch, D.M., Spanier, K., Radoschewski, F.M. et al. Associations between overcommitment, effort–reward imbalance and mental health: findings from a longitudinal study. Int Arch Occup Environ Health 92, 559–567 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00420-018-1391-7

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