Within-person increases in job autonomy linked to greater employee strain
研究发现，工作自主性在个体间的稳定水平与较低情绪耗竭相关，但个体内工作自主性的增加反而导致更大情绪耗竭，挑战了自主性总是有益的普遍观点。
It is commonly believed that job autonomy has a positive impact on employee well-being and protects workers from strain. However, an emerging counter-narrative challenges this assumption and identifies ways in which greater job autonomy has negative impacts, especially for jobs that already have substantial autonomy. Contributing to this debate, our longitudinal study disaggregates stable, between-person variation in job autonomy from dynamic, within-person change in job autonomy over a multi-year period with a sample of Church ministers. We argue that experiencing high and stable job autonomy is conceptually distinct from experiencing an increase in one’s job autonomy; the former being positive for worker well-being while the latter often represents a form of role stress. We develop a two-level model tested by a random-intercept crossed-lagged panel analysis. We find that workers with higher job autonomy than others tend to have lower emotional exhaustion at the between-person level. Also at this level, trait positive affect and, more weakly, trait self-efficacy account for variance in aggregate levels of job autonomy and emotional exhaustion. Our model then evidences the counter-view that within-person increases in job autonomy are followed by greater emotional exhaustion. Implications for extending theory on within-person change in well-being are discussed.