Occupational stress, moral dilemmas, and decision-making confidence among Chinese police officers: the mediating role of emotional exhaustion.

Police officers routinely make consequential decisions in emotionally demanding and morally ambiguous situations, yet how chronic occupational stress and moral strain relate to the confidence with which officers reach those decisions remains poorly specified. This cross-sectional study examined whether the associations of occupational stress and moral dilemmas with decision-making confidence among Chinese police officers are statistically accounted for by emotional exhaustion within a hypothesized mediation model. A convenience sample of 412 active-duty officers from three municipal police bureaus in Henan Province, China, completed validated Chinese versions of the Operational Police Stress Questionnaire, a six-item moral dilemma scale, the emotional exhaustion subscale of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey, the 12-item General Health Questionnaire, and a five-item decision-making confidence scale. Structural equation modeling with 5,000 bias-corrected bootstrap resamples showed that both occupational stress (β = 0.41, p < 0.001) and moral dilemmas (β = 0.27, p < 0.001) were positively associated with emotional exhaustion, which was in turn negatively associated with decision-making confidence (β = -0.38, p < 0.001). The indirect effects of occupational stress (indirect effect = -0.16, 95% CI [-0.21, -0.11]) and moral dilemmas (indirect effect = -0.10, 95% CI [-0.15, -0.06]) through emotional exhaustion were both statistically significant, whereas the direct effects of the two antecedents were non-significant. The model explained 38% of the variance in emotional exhaustion and 15% of the variance in decision-making confidence. These findings are consistent with resource-based interpretations grounded in conservation of resources theory, and they identify emotional exhaustion as a potentially modifiable correlate of officers' self-evaluated decisional capacity; whether reducing burnout also benefits decision-making itself remains to be established with longitudinal and experimental designs.