Occupational well-being of health care workers is an extremely important issue to public opinion, policy makers, hospital managements and social scientists. The Job Demands-Resources model (JD-R) has been successfully applied to many occupational groups for evaluating their quality of working life, and only recently, on groups of health care workers. This paper aims to explore its validity on a sample of 210 Italian health care workers. The analyses, carried out through hierarchical regressions, have revealed several significant associations, many of which conform to the evidences already available in the literature about such theoretical model. Work autonomy and occupational self-efficacy predict work engagement as well as strain (together with workload and coworkers social support). Moreover, selfefficacy and supervisory social support act as buffer with regard to the negative effects of job demands on strain and engagement. Such results have been commented on the basis of the literature and in order to stress their practical implications.
Keywords: Work engagement, strain, Job Demands-Resources model, occupational well-being, health care workers.