Author: Jonas Harring Boll

For years now organisational psychologists have been interested in the relationship between work stressors and various physical and psychological outcomes.

For executives and HR managers a number of variables are particularly interesting as well:

• Intrinsic work motivation
• Exhaustion or burnout
• Turnover intention

In this post I will briefly discuss the relationship between the 3 outcomes listed above and job characteristics.

Intrinsic Work Motivation

Intrinsic work motivation is mainly predicted by work content and task characteristics such as skill variety and work autonomy.

When employees experience high levels of autonomy, receive feedback about their performance and have an important, identifiable piece of work to do that requires skill variety (such as meaningful work), they will generally experience increased levels of happiness and greater motivation to keep performing at a high level.

Emotional Exhaustion

Emotional exhaustion is an important aspect of the Burnout Syndrome and therefore an extremely important factor to take into account when assessing employee wellbeing and satisfaction levels. Emotional exhaustion is also directly related to depression.

Emotional exhaustion is heavily influenced by:

• Workload
• Time pressure
• Lack of social support from colleagues
• Role related stress.

However, particularly workload and lack of social support have been found to predict emotional exhaustion.

High levels of work load leads to an increased taxing of physical and mental resources that eventually can lead to burnout and severe stress. Similarly, lack of social support can affect employee wellbeing in negative ways and lead to emotional exhaustion, when no support or help is received in difficult or stressful moments.

Turnover Intention

During these troubles times, managers are probably more concerned with layoffs off people, than what is going to make employees voluntarily leave a company. Yet, turnover can happen at any time and a number of factors are causing this constant threat to organisations:

• Salary levels
• Career opportunities

When employees perceive themselves to be compensated unfairly or that they can earn a better salary elsewhere, they will be likely to leave. Similarly, limited or even absent career opportunities can make employees leave for better opportunities.