Potential risk factors of employment for mental health of residents in former East and West Germany
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Abstract
Psychological demands on the job have been on the rise in the last decades (Rigó et al., 2021). It is therefore important to assess which demands distress employees and which resources buffer such detrimental effects. Since labor structures as well as (oftentimes economic) resources differ between the former states of East and West Germany, disparities in the process of work stress could be assumed, as well.
To this end, a theoretical model was built to explain the mechanisms of how job demands, job-related environmental as well as individual resources, and personality affect the evaluative appraisal of stressors. Stressors are then perceived as either overburdening (distress) or positively challenging (eustress) with the first fostering adverse health. All of these components are afflicted on a higher level by the region individuals live in: former Eastern or Western German states. Using this, the question should be answered how associations and effects regarding job demands and other occupational characteristics as well as employee health differ between the former Eastern and Western states of Germany. Region-specific working conditions as well as health and well-being should thereby be emphasized.
The first article used cross-sectional data from a representative survey from 2014 (N = 1,065). For the specification of emotional exhaustion as outcome variable, the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (Kristensen et al., 2005) was used. Technostress was indicated by several items regarding strain because of Internet use at the job, the number of received e-mails during work or leisure time, as well as the perceived social pressure to be constantly available. With that and the inclusion of sociodemographic variables, environmental job demands and personality could be observed in their association with mental health. Results were compared between citizens of the former Eastern and Western states of Germany. An ordinary least squares regression was performed to predict emotional exhaustion. Additionally, region in East or West Germany was added as a variable in the next step to observe regional differences of the predictors. In the second article, 3,848 respondents at two time points (2006 and 2011) of the German Socio-Economic Panel were observed. Life satisfaction as a component of subjective well-being (Diener et al., 1999; Fergusson et al., 2015) served as dependent variable. Siegrist’s (1996) effort-reward imbalance at work model indicated participants’ working conditions. Overcommitment and personal net income served as additional crucial predictors. Besides sociodemographic variables, job-related environmental and individual resources as well as personality could be assessed in their associations with well-being. A within-between model was estimated to include both fixed and random effects separately. Additional interaction terms between region in East or West Germany and ERI, overcommitment, as well as personal income gave insights into further regional differences.
Two studies confirmed the hypothesized mechanisms of the theoretical model, portraying how East and West Germans diverged in job-related demands while exhibiting different levels of resources. Region as macro level impacts the process of job-related stress genesis. While the first article highlighted that the prevalence of observed job demands indicated by technostress was inconsistently distributed between East and West, West Germans exhibited higher levels of emotional exhaustion. This might be a consequence of the finding that West Germans’ exhaustion levels showed a stronger association with technostress indicators compared to East Germans. It also signals that East and West Germans appraise stressors differently since the components leading to this appraisal diverge, as well. The second article presented the findings that East Germans received fewer rewards within their work domain, resulting in higher imbalances between such rewards and their accomplished efforts compared to West Germans. Further, East Germans turned out to be more overcommitted to their work, indicating an unhealthy number of sacrifices to their jobs. East Germans thus receive fewer environmental resources and exhibit more detrimental individual resources through overcommitment. This could partially explain the lower life satisfaction in East Germany compared to West Germany. Moreover, compared to West Germans, East Germans’ life satisfaction could be more strongly improved by increasing personal incomes. Again, this indicates a differing appraisal of stressors between regions. With an increased environmental resource via personal income, East Germans were less afflicted by job demands. This underlines that job-related rewards (especially in the form of personal income) should be increased to improve East Germans’ working conditions, thereby enhancing social and health-related equity between the former states of East and West Germany. In general, the observed job demands as well as low individual or environmental resources and their disparate exchange were associated with adverse health symptoms and lower well-being. Therefore, the importance of both environmental and individual resources for employee health was confirmed. Regional disparities and peculiarities regarding work structures and job characteristics should be further highlighted in future research on occupational health.