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Heavy Work Investment and Job Burnout: The Moderating Role of Health Promotion and Psychological
Capital

contacts, and in-person visits. Although we make best efforts to ensure diversity and
representativeness of the sample, our sample cannot be exempted from the problem
of selection bias (Breen, 1996). Second, we obtain our data from a single source at
two separate time points. We are unable to eliminate all concerns about the common

method variance among variables. In a self-reported survey, it is possible that employees
overestimate their work engagement or psychological capital due to their social desirability
tendency.

Nonetheless, one important contribution of this study is that it simultaneously
examines the effects of two types of heavy work investment—workaholism and work
engagement—on job burnout based on the effort-recovery theory (Meijman and Mulder,
1998). Furthermore, this study incorporates the conservation of resources theory to
emphasize that health promotion activities (explicit factor) and psychological capital

(implicit factor) can be effective personal resources to alleviate burnout caused by heavy
work investment.
Most notably, the recovery mechanisms defined in traditional effort-recovery theory

are relatively passive. Conversely, this study argues that both employees and organizations
can adopt active methods to preserve and build employees’ personal resources and speed
the effort-recovery process. We suggest that researchers can expand our theoretical
framework by identifying other active methods to help employees recover from the
negative consequences of heavy work investment.

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