The interplay between work overload, trait motivation, and emotional exhaustion on job satisfaction and happiness
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Fiona E. Raines
Department of Psychology, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA
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Shahnaz Aziz
Department of Psychology, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA
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Julia King
SHL, Atlanta, GA 30361, USA
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Kristin S. Allen
SHL, Atlanta, GA 30361, USA
Abstract
Job satisfaction and happiness have received considerable attention in recent literature, as the work landscape increasingly prioritizes and seeks to maximize employee well-being. Despite considerable extant research looking at organizational factors, individual antecedents of these desirable outcomes, such as motivation and burnout, have yet to be examined. In the present study, we seek to address this gap by applying the frameworks of the Job Demands-Resources model and Conservation of Resources theory to examine achievement motivation and emotional exhaustion (a key aspect of burnout) as predictors of job satisfaction and global employee happiness. A cross-sectional, secondary dataset sampling 844 working professionals via an Amazon Mechanical Turk survey was employed to investigate the interplay between environmental factors (i.e., work overload), individual factors (i.e., trait motivation and emotional exhaustion as a core component of burnout), and the outcomes of job satisfaction and happiness. Emotional exhaustion and anxiety motivation were negatively related to job satisfaction and happiness, while achievement motivation was positively related to them. Additionally, findings demonstrated evidence that work overload relates to job satisfaction and happiness through an emotional exhaustion statistical mediation pathway. Future researchers should confirm and expand on our findings by evaluating these relationships in longitudinal studies and more heterogeneous samples to examine temporal effects.
Copyright (c) 2026 Fiona E. Raines, Shahnaz Aziz, Julia King, Kristin S. Allen
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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