The Role of Job Autonomy in the Relationship between Emotional Job Demands and Employee Work Engagement in a Taiwanese Multi-finance Company

Abstract

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In accordance with the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory, every occupation in different work settings have job demands and job resources that are associated with employees’ burnout and engagement. In recent years, a high level of emotional stress has been reported by employees working in multi-finance industry in Taiwan. This could be problematic as emotional job demands have been found to be negatively related with work outcomes, such as work engagement. Therefore, in order to reduce the adverse impact of emotional job demands, companies are recommended to provide adequate job resources, such as job autonomy to the employees. In this research, the relationship between emotional job demands, work engagement and job autonomy amongst 120 employees from Chailease Finance Holding were examined. The result found a negative relationship between emotional job demands and work engagement. Moreover, job autonomy was also found to be a significant moderator, whereby when job autonomy was high, the negative relationship between emotional job demands and work engagement became less pronounced. Additionally, group comparisons between front-office and back-office employees reveal that front-office employees experience higher levels of emotional job demands compared to back-office employees. Moreover, work schedule autonomy was also found to be the only dimension of job autonomy that was significantly related to front-office employees’ work engagement levels. The result of this study contributes to the research in the area of JD-R theory, specifically on the relationship between emotional job demands, work engagement and job autonomy in the selected case company, Chailease Finance Holding.Keywords: emotional job demands, work engagement, job autonomy