Exhaustion and emotional demands in China: a large-scale investigation across occupations

Kelly Z Peng

doi:10.1186/s11782-017-0003-9

Abstract

As the Chinese economy moves toward a market-based model, employees are likely to face more emotional demands and exhaustion at work. However, there are some unique aspects to the emotional demands of work in the Chinese cultural context. We investigate emotional demands and exhaustion in China with a large-scale sample across the six major occupations identified by the Holland classification system. Results show that incumbents of social and enterprising jobs face higher emotional demands. Unexpectedly, exhaustion differs significantly between conventional and other types of jobs. Building on the Job Demand-Resources (JD-R) model, job crafting and the cultural context, we propose that the nonlinear relationship of emotional demands and exhaustion exists only when emotional intelligence is low. Our study may inform practitioners and policy makers in Chinese enterprises about emotional demands and exhaustion for various occupations and the importance of selection and training programs in emotional intelligence.

Highlights

The Chinese economy is moving toward a more market-orientated model from a planning economy, and companies are working to improve services to both internal and external customers (Chow 2015)
Considering that emotional intelligence is an important resource (Mayer, Caruso, and Salovey 1999) and has been investigated in the Chinese context (e.g., Law, Wong, Huang, and Li 2008; Peng, Wong, and Che 2010), we further examine whether and how exactly this resource can reduce the impact of emotional demands on exhaustion for Chinese employees
As expected from the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, emotional demands and emotional intelligence are significantly correlated with exhaustion (r = 0.31, p < 0.01; r = −0.28, p < 0.01, respectively) as shown by Table 3, which presents the descriptive statistics, reliabilities

Summary

Introduction

The Chinese economy is moving toward a more market-orientated model from a planning economy, and companies are working to improve services to both internal and external customers (Chow 2015). As Chinese workers are embedded in an interdependent-based context, they are accustomed to a dialectical approach to dealing with emotions When they need to follow “display rules” that are professionally required, they may feel even greater pressure and may be more likely to experience exhaustion in emotionally demanding occupations (Cheung and Tang 2007). Since they lack the required resources, they probably will engage in job crafting as an alternative to deal with the demands when they no longer can cope with the demands directly In so doing, they are able to maintain their energy levels to perform their core work tasks, and in turn reduce exhaustion in the long run (Schaufeli et al 2009; Tims et al 2013). The relationship will remain linear when emotional intelligence is high

Methodology

Results

Tenure

Discussion

Conclusion