Effects of physical activity on job burnout in college administrative teachers with chain mediation of psychological resilience and disengagement

As the core force to ensure the order of education and teaching, administrative teachers in colleges and universities have long been facing multiple stressors such as complicated affairs, strict assessment, and role conflicts. In recent years, job burnout has become a prominent problem affecting their physical and mental health and work effectiveness. Although physical activity, mental resilience and psychological detachment have their own anti-job burnout effects, there is a lack of systematic empirical research on the chain relationship and synergistic mediating effect of "behavioral intervention-psychological regulation-job burnout alleviation" among the three. In this study, a cross-sectional research design was adopted to conduct a questionnaire survey on administrative teachers in two universities in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and 295 valid data were collected, including data on their physical activity, psychological resilience, psychological detachment and job burnout. SPSS 27.0 was used for descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis, and PROCESS 4.1 plug-in was used for chain mediation model analysis. Physical activity has a significant negative predictive effect on job burnout; psychological resilience and psychological disengagement play multiple mediating effects in the relationship between the two, of which the direct effect accounts for 59.71%, the chain-mediated effect of "Physical Activity → Psychological Resilience → Psychological Disengagement → Job burnout " chain mediating effect accounted for 8.25%. The study findings indicate that physical activity not only exhibits a direct correlation with occupational burnout among administrative faculty members, but may also demonstrate an indirect relationship through a chain pathway of "enhancing psychological resilience promoting psychological alienation." This discovery provides valuable insights for optimizing mental health management strategies for university administrative staff, offering significant implications for encouraging faculty participation in physical activities and establishing sustainable occupational health models.