Abstract
Using a panel of 324 Chinese employees in public sectors, this paper examines the work engagement of employees in moonlighting with the proxy of boundaryless career orientations. We divided work engagement into job engagement and organizational engagement and test their relation to boundaryless career orientations. The results demonstrate that boundaryless career orientations are positively related to job engagement via the mediating effects of role conflicts, and negatively related to organizational engagement through the mediating effects of the relational psychological contracts. Moreover, organizational climate for openness moderates the negative correlation between boundaryless career orientations and role conflicts. There is no significant evidence provided for a moderating effect of organizational climate for openness between boundaryless career orientations and relational psychological contracts.
Highlights
In an era of increased longevity and a globalized economy, organizational boundaries became more ambiguous, and traditional organizational careers were less desirable (Arthur et al, 2005)
Drawing on recent work in organizational psychology (Hofhuis et al, 2016; Brimbal et al, 2020; Carlucci et al, 2020), this present study introduces the concept of organizational climate for openness in the context of moonlighting to examine the relation between boundaryless career orientations and work engagement
From the perspective of Job Demands-Resources Theory (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017), we argue that, when there is a good organizational climate for openness, employees may have a higher degree of autonomy in the workplace, coordinating their material and spiritual resources to meet the job requirements, thereby alleviate the role conflicts and other pressures caused by moonlighting role conflicts
Summary
In an era of increased longevity and a globalized economy, organizational boundaries became more ambiguous, and traditional organizational careers were less desirable (Arthur et al, 2005). Individuals are no longer bound to one single organization (Eby et al, 2003; Abele and Spurk, 2009), but gain sequences of experiences across different organizations and jobs (Arthur, 1994b; Eby et al, 2003; Cybal-Michalska, 2020) This has led to the emergence of a notion—a boundaryless career—characterized by transcending organizational memberships and taking a range of forms of employment beyond traditional assumptions (Peiperl et al, 2002). In this boundaryless career era, a rising population of employees begin to moonlight, that is to take on part-time jobs in addition to regular obligations of one. Current studies on moonlighting mostly regard this behavior as a variable, focusing on its determinants (Guariglia and Kim, 2006; John and Winters, 2010; Abeyrathna, 2020) and
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