WEDNESDAY, April 16, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Work-home interference (WHI) -- whether work-home conflict (WHC), when work interferes with home life, or home-work conflict (HWC), when private life interferes with work roles -- appears to contribute significantly to the risk for burnout, according to research published in the April issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Victoria Blom, Ph.D., of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and colleagues conducted a co-twin control analysis of 4,446 Swedish twins to assess the impact of WHI on burnout, defined as depression, emotional exhaustion, and feeling run down.
The researchers observed a significant association between both WHC and HWC and burnout, with women perceiving more burnout than men and feeling greater WHC. The impact of HWC was about the same among men and women, with genetic factors contributing toward the HWC-burnout association in women.
"The present results show that both WHC and HWC are significantly associated with burnout, and that these associations are not affected by age, education, job demands, or children living at home," the authors write. Furthermore, the authors stress that, "it is also important for the employees themselves to develop self-regulation strategies to encounter negative spillover of work at home, such as not working from home, which is increasingly prevalent in today's boundary-less work life."
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