Task 8

Question 1

Regarding recovery, should a person at risk for burnout try to do more sports during his/her free time?

Answer 1

yes, study (Oerlemans et al) found beneficial effects of physical activities contributing to daily recovery for all employees (high AND low at risk for burnout)

–> time spent on physical activities has positive effect on all daily recovery outcomes (i.e., physical vigor, cognitive liveliness, & recovery) for all employees

Question 2

Something else that might help employees who are at risk of burnout to recover?

Answer 2

• stop spending time on work-related activities during off-job time
• spend more time on low-effort & social activities

–> low-effort: benefit primarily from low-effort activities in terms of the restoration of momentary physical & cognitive resources in off-job time, but not recovery at bedtime

–> social activities: fulfill important psychological needs & can be invigorating & provides opportunity to detach from their stressful work environment & relax

Question 3

Should employees at high risk for burnout prevent spending time on job-related activity during their free (off-job) time or not? (could it harm to do job-related activities during free time when having a
burnout risk)?

Answer 3

• yes, it is harmful for employees at high risk
• individuals who are high in burnout have mostly depleted their affective, physical & cognitive resources & are not well equipped to deal with additional work-related efforts, resulting in poor daily recovery

Question 4

Could something like mindfulness perhaps help to improve job satisfaction & hence to reduce the risk from becoming exhausted or burned-out?

Answer 4

• study 1: state & trait mindfulness are related to emotional exhaustion & job satisfaction on a daily basis & that the relationships are mediated by surface acting
• study 2: findings suggest that decreases in surface acting, emotional exhaustion & increases in job satisfaction are causally driven by mindfulness meditation

Question 5

By what processes can this be expected? (see Hulsheger et al., 2013)

Answer 5

• Affective events theory (AET): suggests that mindfulness may be positively related to job satisfaction
  o When mindful individuals attend to the present moment in a receptive, non-judgmental way, they observe stressful events more objectively & refrain from attaching a meaning or evaluation to it

-mindfulness –> deep acting (& NOT surface acting)

==> less mindful –> more surface acting –> higher emotional exhaustion & lower job satisfaction

==> more mindful –> less surface acting –> lower emotional exhaustion & higher job satisfaction

Question 6

What’s the relationship between work engagement & recovery (& factors that might attenuate this relationship) –> Sonnentag et al. (2012)

Answer 6

• morning recovery level predicted work engagement during the workday & that work engagement, in turn, predicted recovery level at the end of the workday
• recovery level & work engagement mutually reinforce each other: the more recovered an employee is in the morning, the more engagement the employee will experience at work, which limits the decrease in the employee’s recovery level over the course of the day
• situational constraints as harmful moderators
• -> 1. affective consequences of situational constraints –> situational constraints evoke negative affective states, such as anger & anxiety, that call for ER
• -> 2. (more likely): situational constraints, such as lack of information or supplies, actually impede the task completion process, requiring additional effort to get the work done