“Lines Demarked”: A Way to Foster Occupational Health in Police Officers

Abstract

Police officers are part of a demanding professional activity with a high risk of occupational health and work–family conflict, and this is a topic of relevance to understanding occupational health sustainability. Based on this, this study developed and tested a mediation model that accounts for the work–family conflict (WFC) in the relationship between work–family boundary segmentation and well-being (i.e., burnout and engagement). A sample of 291 police officers from Portugal was used, and the hypotheses were tested by using structural equation modeling methods implemented with Mplus. The results indicated that over nonstandard work schedules and unpredictable working hours, family–work segmentation was negatively related to WFC, and work–family segmentation was negatively related to family-to-work conflict. Moreover, WFC fully mediated the relationship between segmentation and engagement but only partially mediated the relationship between segmentation and burnout. Conversely, family-to-work conflict fully mediated the relationship between segmentation and burnout but was not related to engagement. Such results suggest that the occupational health of these professionals is interdependent on their opportunity to enact the segmentation strategy to manage the boundary between work and family domains. In terms of its practical implications, this study sheds light on the environmental conditions of police officers that can foster and sustain their well-being.