Exploring the role of social support, work/family conflict, and gender-role ideology on burnout in a Nigerian sample

Abstract

Research in burnout, using social support, work/family conflict, and gender-role ideology as predictors, has been largely concentrated around the Western societies, which have obvious cultural dissimilarities with African societies. The purpose of our research was therefore to advance this line of research and examine the influence of these variables on burnout among blue-collar workers from the Igbo speaking people of Nigeria. A survey design in which participants responded to scales designed to measure the variables was used. Result showed that supervisor support had significant negative relationship with burnout, while no significant relationship was found between family support and burnout. Both components of work/family conflict were found to be positively related to burnout. Significant interaction between supervisor support and work-to-family conflict was found, showing that workers who reported high supervisor support and high work-to-family conflict reported higher burnout than those who expressed high supervisor support and low work-to-family conflict. Gender was also found to moderate the effect of gender-role ideology and family-to-work conflict on burnout in the direction that men who reported higher family-towork conflict and reported more liberal gender-role ideology reported higher experience of burnout than women. While the result of this study affirmed the cross-cultural invariant effect of work/family conflict on burnout, it showed that, under certain conditions, social support and liberal gender-role ideology can be detrimental to workers health among the blue-collar workers of Igbo people, challenging the age long assumption that social support and liberal gender-role ideology are always beneficial in mitigating the effect of work stressors. It was therefore recommended that theories and researchers begin to take this into consideration.

Key words: Burnout, social support, work/conflict, Gender-role ideology