The role of job demand, employee resilience and social support on psychological stress among non-clinical staffs

Psychological stress is posing serious threats to occupational health within the healthcare setting and more specifically for the hospital support services working under high levels of job demands and constant service delivery expectations. Though there is an abundance of literature on the clinical healthcare workforce, non-clinical hospital concession employees have received marginal attention and even more so within the Malaysian Public–Private Partnership (PPP) model that leave a significant gap of knowledge on the psychosocial threats that they encounter. Therefore, this study is conducted with the intention to capture factors that might influence psychological stress among non-clinical staffs in hospital. The study tested three independent variables namely, job demand, employee resilience, and social support against psychological stress. A total of 142 questionnaire were distributed online using Google form with response rate of 90.84%. In this study, hypotheses for direct relationship were tested using multiple regression analyses. Results showed that only employee resilience and social support were negatively related to psychological stress. The findings indicate that psychological stress tend to reduce when employees have high resiliency and receive high social support from colleagues and supervisors. Interestingly, job demand does not influence non-clinical staffs psychological stress. These findings provide new insight where on issues of psychological stress among non-clinical staffs in hospital in Malaysia. The question of why having high job demand does not influence the psychological stress experienced by the no-medical staffs in hospital provide opportunity for future research to reconcile these explanations.