Woes of job burnout:the role of recovery experiences and organization-based self-esteem

Despite previous research has proposed self-regulatory remedies for job burnout, burnout remains a contemporary issue, and employees find it difficult to overcome. Based on the conservation of resources theory and selected the classical self-regulation remedy — job crafting, we developed a framework to explain why employees fail to handle with burnout alone by linking job burnout to job crafting, and identify contingencies that can ameliorate the adverse effects of job burnout. Using a sample of 339 bank employees and collecting data in three waves, we found that job burnout negatively affects employees’ job crafting through lower levels of recovery experiences. Organization-based self-esteem as a vital resource that employees obtain from organizations and transform into personal resources, alleviates the negative relationship between job burnout and recovery experiences, as well as the mediating effect of recovery experiences on the relationship between job burnout and job crafting. The theoretical and practical implications as well as opportunities for future research are discussed.