Abstract
Based on the conservation of resources theory, this study aims to create new knowledge on the antecedents of emotional exhaustion. We explore the internal mechanism and boundary conditions of the impact of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion, using data gathered from 460 frontline service employees at an airport in China. Employees completed questionnaires regarding ethical leadership, emotional exhaustion, organizational embeddedness, job satisfaction, and demographic variables. After controlling for the effects of demographic variables and company tenure, ethical leadership was found to have a negative impact on emotional exhaustion (β = −0.128, p < 0.01), and to be positively related to organizational embeddedness (β = 0.518, p < 0.01). After adding in the mediating variable (organizational embeddedness), the effect of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion was no longer significant (β = 0.012, ns), while organizational embeddedness emerged as significantly related to emotional exhaustion (β = −0.269, p < 0.01), implying that the effect of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion was completely mediated by organizational embeddedness. Simultaneously, the results suggested that job satisfaction could strengthen the mediating effect of organizational embeddedness on emotional exhaustion (the difference in the mediating effect between the groups with respective high and low job satisfaction was −0.096, p < 0.05). This study proposed and validated a moderated mediation model, the implications of which are that ethical leadership is an effective way to alleviate frontline service employees’ emotional exhaustion.
Highlights
Job burnout, defined as a state of exhaustion and cynicism towards work [1], has become an established focus of scholars’ attention in the last few decades
The results indicate that the 4-factor model fitted the data better than the other models
Our research extends the study of ethical leadership into the field of emotion and enriches the research literature pertaining to ethical leadership and emotional exhaustion
Summary
Job burnout, defined as a state of exhaustion and cynicism towards work [1], has become an established focus of scholars’ attention in the last few decades. On May 28th, 2019, the World Health Organization announced that burnout had been included in the 11th Revision of International Classification of Diseases (ICD−11) as an occupational phenomenon [3]. The core dimension of burnout [4], is detrimental to employees’ physical and mental health, but is harmful to enterprises’ sustainable development. Employees who become emotionally exhausted display sabotage behaviors, poor performance, high turnover intentions, and so on [5,6,7]. Emotional exhaustion is a widespread phenomenon, especially among frontline service employees
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