Exploring the connection between work–family conflict and job burnout among Nigerian correctional staff

Abstract

Only one study among U.S. prison staff has explored the effects of work–family conflict and job burnout. To replicate the research to determine whether the results vary by nation, this study examined the effects of four types of work–family conflict (strain-based, time-based, behavior-based and family-based conflict) on three dimensions of job burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and feeling ineffective at work) among Nigerian correctional staff. Strain- and behavior-based conflict had significant positive effects on emotional exhaustion, but time- and family-based conflict did not. Family-based conflict was the only type of domain spillover with significant positive effects on depersonalization. Behavior-based conflict was the only type of work–family conflict with significant positive effects on feeling ineffective at work. Time-based and strain-based conflict were highly related to one another, which was attributed to time-based conflict being a contributor to strain-based conflict for Nigerian prison staff.

Key words:

• Correctional staff
• depersonalization
• emotional exhaustion
• job burnout
• Nigeria
• prison staff
• reduced sense of accomplishment at work
• work–family conflict

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the reviewers, editor and editorial staff for their review of the paper. Their suggestions improved the paper.

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Eric G. Lambert has declared no conflicts of interest

Jennifer L. Lanterman has declared no conflicts of interest

O. Oko Elechi has declared no conflicts of interest

Smart Otu has declared no conflicts of interest

Morris Jenkins has declared no conflicts of interest

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of both an institutional review board [University of Mississippi] and a research ethics committee [Funai Research and Ethics Committee (FREC), Nigeria] and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

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

Notes

1 We believe that the time-based and strain-based items loaded on the same factor because time-based conflict contributes to strain-based conflict, which is supported by the literature (see Lambert et al., 2021). Further, in a study among police officers that included strain-based conflict as the dependent variable and role conflict, role ambiguity, role underload, role overload, job autonomy, quality of supervision, quality of job straining, job variety, behavior-based conflict and time-based conflict as the independent variables, time-based conflict had the largest effect size on strain-based conflict, and the effect was positive (Lambert et al., 2016). Nonetheless, it is important to note the factor analysis results for the work–family conflict items and for readers to take this issue into context when reviewing the results.

2 Listwise deletion was used to handle missing data. Listwise deletion may be used when less than 10% of data are missing (Bennett, 2001; Schafer, 1999). The 11 participants who had not completed all the items used in the current study accounted for 8.4% of the cases. In addition to the reported results in Table 3 based on listwise deletion, regression analyses were also conducted using estimations for missing data rather than listwise deletion. There were no differences in terms of significant predictors between the listwise regression results and the regression results with estimation for missing items.

As noted earlier, the time-based and strain-based conflict items loaded on the same factor in the factor analysis. Based on theoretical reasoning and support in the literature, time-based and strain-based conflict were kept as separate variables. Nonetheless, the regression analyses were redone using a combined measure of time-based and strain-based conflict, and this combined measure was only a significant predictor of emotional exhaustion burnout and had nonsignificant effects on both depersonalization burnout and a reduced sense of accomplishment at work burnout. Time-based conflict had a nonsignificant association with all three burnout dimension measures in the regression analyses reported in Table 3, and strain-based conflict had only significant effects on emotional exhaustion as reported. In other words, the results using the combined measure were the same in terms of effects for work–family conflict as those reported in Table 3.