Physical activity in employees with differing occupational stress and mental health profiles: A latent profile analysis

Objectives: To examine whether employees with differing occupational stress and mental health profiles differ in their self-reported levels of physical activity. Design: Cross-sectional survey data. Method: The sample consisted of 2660 Swedish health care workers and social insurance officers (85% women, M 1⁄4 46.3 years). Latent profile analysis was performed to identify classes. Between-classdifferences in physical activity were tested via c2-tests and multinominal logistic regression analyses using sex, age, BMI, marital status, children at home, caregiving, and smoking as covariates. Results: Latent profile analysis resulted in a six-profile solution. Two pairs of classes had equal stress levels, one pair with high stress, one pair with moderate stress. Within each pair, one group showed some resilience (i.e. only moderate mental health problems despite high stress or good mental health despite moderate stress), whereas the other did not. The other two classes were characterized by either low stress and good mental health or moderate-to-high stress and elevated mental health problems. Participants who were resilient to high or moderate stress were more active than participants of the corresponding non-resilient classes. Participants with low stress and good mental health reported the highest physical activity levels, participants with high stress and high mental health problems reported the lowest physical activity levels. Conclusions: The findings suggest that physical activity is associated with resilience to occupational stress, and that beyond primary prevention efforts to make work less stressful regular physical activity should be a target variable for health professionals working in the occupational setting. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Stress-related mental health problems, such as burnout, depression and anxiety are an important public health issue, and are associated with increased turnover and absenteeism rates, reduced organizational commitment, and lower job performance (Cropanzano, Rupp, & Byrne, 2003). Burnout has a high temporal stability with studies showing that correlations over several years vary between 0.50 and 0.60 (Toppinen-Tanner, Kalimo, &Mutanen, 2002). Burnout has also been shown to be an important health hazard linked with cardiovascular diseases (Melamed, Shirom, Toker, Berliner, & Shapira, 2006), but also with poorer self-rated health (Gorter, Eijkman, & Hoogstraten, 2000) and various mental health problems including disturbed sleep (Grossi, Perski, Evengard, Blomkvist, & Orth-Gomer, 2003) and psychosomatic complaints (Gorter et al., 2000). Melamed et al. (2006) have further argued that if coping resources are depleted, symptoms of burnout can result into depressive disorders or more general anxiety disorders (cp. Ahola et al., 2005). Nevertheless, although most employees encounter some degree of occupational stress, not all develop health problems due to this. To maintain a state of personal well-being, and to avoid downward spirals associated with high occupational stress, individuals need both coping skills and other resources to deal with stressful experiences to prevent the development of health problems such as depressive moods, burnout or other psychologically unhealthy conditions (Hobfoll, 1998). * This study was supported by a grant from the Swedish government. * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ41 61 377 87 83; fax: þ41 61 377 87 89. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Gerber).