Does job complexity mitigate the negative effect of emotion-rule dissonance on employee burnout?
基于对583名养老护理员的两轮面板数据，研究发现情绪规则不一致会导致情绪耗竭和去人格化，而工作复杂性可以减轻这种负面影响。
In interactions with clients or patients, human service workers are at risk of experiencing discrepancies between felt and organizationally mandated emotions (i.e. emotion-rule dissonance). Given the documented detrimental effects of such discrepancies on employee strain, the present study investigated whether job complexity mitigates the relation between emotion-rule dissonance and employee burnout using data from a two-wave panel study of eldercare workers (N = 583, 16-month time lag). Structural equation modelling revealed that emotion-rule dissonance at Time 1 preceded emotional exhaustion and depersonalization at Time 2. Beyond that, employees whose work offered job complexity were found to suffer less from emotional exhaustion and depersonalization when encountering discrepancies between felt and stipulated emotions compared to employees who conducted noncomplex work. Thus, designing complex tasks appears to be a crucial starting point for alleviating employee burnout in jobs that provoke emotion-rule dissonance.