Psychological pathways linking job demands, emotional exhaustion, and prosocial behavior among community workers during public health emergencies

Community workers frequently experience significant job stress during public health emergencies, which may adversely impact their prosocial behavior. Based on the job demands-resources framework, this paper explores how workload, role conflict, and emotional labor are associated with helping behavior via emotional exhaustion and work engagement, and tests for a buffering role of perceived organizational support (POS). A cross-sectional survey of 477 community workers was analyzed using structural equation modeling with bootstrapped indirect effects. Job demands were positively related to emotional exhaustion and negatively related to work engagement. Emotional exhaustion was linked to less helping behavior, whereas work engagement correlated with more helping behavior and produced substantial parallel indirect effects for all three demands. POS weakened the connections between job demands and emotional exhaustion and also lessened the exhaustion-mediated indirect impacts, indicating moderated mediation. This suggests that to sustain helping behaviors in crisis contexts, it is crucial to mitigate excessive job demands and enhance organizational support, thereby safeguarding workers' psychological energy and maintaining their engagement.