The impacts of self-care and resilience on fatigue: Civil airline pilots in Taiwan

Profound stress at work is thought to make people feel dissatisfied and exhausted with their jobs, which in turn may affect the quality of their self-care and work performances. Paradoxically, poor work performances may further heighten individual’s stress magnitude. For civil pilots, such vicious cycle is very likely to jeopardize the aviation safety. In aviation sector, a civil pilot who undergoes unbearable stress is deemed as one of the most devastating human factors to escalate flight safety risk. As such, civil pilots’ stress management and coping behaviours have always been pressing issues for risk control and safety reason in civil aviation industry. To date, self-care and resilience have been identified as two germane intervention targets to strengthen pilots’ stress management and coping. In this study, a five-factor Resilience Scale was compiled to depict civil pilots’ resilience dimensions. Self-care Scale was developed per Johari window model, while a 4-component Fatigue at Flight Work Scale was used to reflect the status quo of pilots’ fatigues and exhaustions. Along with their scheduled physical exam, 748 civil pilots were invited to respond to these questionnaires. Notably, we found both self-caring and resilience scores correlated with workplace psychological fatigue magnitude in a negative manner regardless of pilots’ sense of work stress. For the Self-care Scale, the open-self area was found to associate positively with the resilience score, while negatively with workplace fatigue one. Pilots displaying higher scores on either Self-care or Resilience Scale were prone to display lower scores on Fatigue at Flight Work Scale. These results, taken together, prompt us to conclude civil pilots’ high quality of self-care and resilience may serve as an effective workplace fatigue-preventing antidote albeit pilots’ work stress experienced. These findings warrant further study for the effectiveness of resilience and self-care interventions on stress reduction and performance optimization for civil pilots.