This work analyzes occupational stress in 95 Portuguese military agents of the Republican National Guard. We applied an evaluation protocol with measures of global stress, burnout, proactive coping, organizational commitment, satisfaction with life, and professional satisfaction/accomplishment. The fidelity and validity results of the instruments were very acceptable. The results of burnout pointed out a remarkable level of emotional exhaustion (12%) followed by cynicism (10%) and low professional effectiveness (8%) (but we have not found any participant with burnout values in the three dimensions simultaneously), and different variables were observed in the prediction of those three areas. The discriminant analysis among subgroups allowed us to verify two main aspects: (a) lower levels of organizational commitment and more use of proactive coping in younger and/or inexperienced military agents and (b) higher desire to leave the job/profession and cynicism in older and/or more experienced professionals. At the end, the authors discuss the importance of future research to analyze the effects of a higher tendency to use cynicism as their age increase and the consequences of a lower organizational commitment in terms of professional efficacy of the younger agents.
Occupational stress; Burnout; Coping; Organizational commitment; Satisfaction
