Page 37 - 臺大管理論叢第32卷第2期

NTU Management Review Vol. 32 No. 2 Aug. 2022

4. Discussion

Although organizations appreciate employees’ willingness to devote themselves to
the work (Harter et al., 2002), employees under the state of heavy work for a long period

may not be beneficial to themselves as well as their organizations (Gillet et al., 2018).
Drawing on the effort-recovery theory (Meijman and Mulder, 1998), we simultaneously
investigate the effects of two types of heavy work investment (i.e., workaholism and work
engagement) on employees’ job burnout. We also employ the conservation of resources

theory (Hobfoll, 1989, 2002) to examine how personal resources—health promotion and
psychological capital—buffer the adverse impact of heavy work investment on job burnout.
Our study contributes to the literature of heavy work investment by exploring whether the
two types of heavy work investment have different effects on job burnout due to different

cognitive and work motivations. Overall, our findings suggest that workaholism and work
engagement can be distinguished both conceptually and empirically.
In previous literature, one of the unclearly answered questions is whether employees
can prevent job burnout arising from heavy work investment, or whether employees

can adopt a certain resource-leveling strategy or mechanism to mitigate the negative
consequences of heavy work investment. Our present study finds that health promotion
effectively attenuates the positive relationship between workaholism and job burnout.
Specifically, for employees with a strong workaholic tendency, they experience a long

period of heavy work. These employees’ excessive or compulsive workaholism is prone
to deplete their physical and psychological resources. Nevertheless, we find that health
promotion can be an effective way to help these employees recover personal resources or
mitigate the loss of personal resources.

Furthermore, this study finds that psychological capital moderates the negative rela-
tionship between work engagement and job burnout. When psychological capital is high,
this relationship is strengthened; when psychological capital is low, this relationship is
weakened. Therefore, psychological capital as an important personal resource (consisting

of four components: optimism, efficacy, resiliency, and hope), which is crucial for coping
with the negative consequences of heavy work investment.
Notably, this study has two limitations that should be mentioned here. First,
to increase the response rate, we collect data through personal referrals, telephone

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