Abstract
Frontline managers have many responsibilities and often suffer from emotional exhaustion. Drawing on the job demands–resources model, this research proposes and examines a cognitive–affective dual mediation model to explain how frontline managers’ sense of power affects their emotional exhaustion through managerial self-efficacy (cognitive path) and affective commitment (affective path). A cross-sectional study design was employed, and the theoretical model was tested using a three-wave survey among 227 on-the-job Master of Business Administration (MBA) students (52.86% male) in China, who serve as frontline managers in different kinds of organization. The regression and bootstrapping analysis results showed that the frontline managers’ sense of power was significantly negatively related to emotional exhaustion. In other words, the more powerful they felt, the less exhausted they felt. Furthermore, having a sense of power enhanced managerial self-efficacy, which mitigated emotional exhaustion. Sense of power also boosted frontline managers’ affective commitment, alleviating emotional exhaustion. We conclude with a discussion of this study’s theoretical and practical contributions and future research directions.
Highlights
Frontline managers are the backbone of an organization, and must perform their duties under increasingly uncertain conditions including global organizations and rapid and continuous market changes
To explore the internal mechanism driving how sense of power impacts emotional exhaustion, we propose a dual mediation model with a cognitive–affective dual path
Drawing on the job demands–resources (JD–R) model [21], we proposed and found support that frontline managers who perceive a greater sense of power tend to experience less emotional exhaustion
Summary
Frontline managers are the backbone of an organization, and must perform their duties under increasingly uncertain conditions including global organizations and rapid and continuous market changes. With organizations becoming flatter, the wider spans of control aggravate the management difficulties of frontline managers. These factors create significant pressure and may threaten their physical and mental health, leading to serious job burnout [1,2,3,4]. “Burnout” is a widely studied topic in occupational health psychology, and refers to a state of physical and mental fatigue related to negative attitudes toward work. Many previous studies have found that emotional exhaustion, a chronic feeling of emotional and physical depletion resulting from workplace stressors, is a core dimension of burnout [7,8,9]
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