Trabalho emocional como preditor de burnout entre policiais militares

Abstract

The goal of this research was to investigate the predictive role of emotional labor in the incidence of police officers’ burnout in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The officer class was chosen to be subject of the risk of physical problems, exhaustion and psychological distress as well as smoking, alcohol abuse, suicidal ideation and, notably, burnout. In addition, the Military Police of RN is currently facing a context of difficulties and poor working conditions, demanding greater attention to the work dynamics of its professionals. All these stressors (social, physical, organizational and contextual) result in significant emotional requirements for police officers, demanding that they manage the display of their emotions during these interactions to maintain proper behavior to both the situation and the police institution. This management of emotional expression to conform to the demands of the job is reported in the literature as "emotional labor". The emotional labor emerges as a form of mediation between professionals and their working environment and can boost or attenuate the negative results of the work on the worker's health, depending on different emotional control strategies and specific features of labor activity. Only a few studies in Organizational Psychology and Labour has address ed this relationship. The sample consisted of 525 police officers from the state of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The Emotional Labor Scale, the Emotional Work Requirements Scale and the emotional exhaustion’s subscale of the Maslach Burnout Inventory for Human Service Survey were used. They were previously adapted from English to Brazilian Portuguese. The first two scales were submitted to a cross-validation procedure. A multiple linear regression was performed with the factors derived from all the scales and with some sociodemographic variables. The results indicate that the emotional labor factors: variety and intensity of emotions, frequency of interaction with suspects and criminals, deep and surface acting, and the perceived need to express positive emotions as part of the police work were predictors of emotional exhaustion and burnout’s incidence. The sociodemographic variables: completed high school, be a Cabo, and acting on external service had also a predictive power over burnout. This study elucidates the handling characteristics of emotions in response to organizational needs of the job in the PM and the impact of this on a prevalent illness in this population, and contributes not only to the literature on the subject, scarce in Brazil, but also with information that can foster the creation of more effective and attentive health policies to the often neglected emotional aspects of police agents’labor.