The role of matching job resources in different demanding situations at work: A vignette study

Abstract

This study examines human service employees' beliefs about the availability, relevance, and use of specific types of job resources (i.e. cognitive, emotional, and physical) in similar types of demanding situations at work. To gain a better understanding of these intra‐psychic processes assumed to underlie the relation between job demands, job resources, and job‐related outcomes, a quasi‐experimental survey study with vignettes was developed. Results showed that different patterns could be observed between the availability, relevance, and use of matching and non‐matching job resources in a physically demanding situation at work. No such differences were observed in a cognitively and emotionally demanding job. Further, it was shown that there generally seems to be a dominant role for emotional job resources in the job stress process, whereas the role of physical job resources and, to a lesser extent, cognitive job resources appears much weaker and mainly restricted to corresponding types of job demands. Finally, results suggested that employees who are faced with a particular type of job demands may take advantage of both matching and non‐matching job resources, implying that the ‘matching hypothesis’ is a probabilistic rather than a static principle.