Exploring The Effects Of Emotional Exhaustion Influencing Its Consequences: Based On Attribution Theory

Emotional exhaustion is one of the most popular issues in the current fields of organizational behavior and management psychology. Many empirical researches had demonstrated that the experienced emotional exhaustion of employees had effects on both attitudinal and behavioral variables (such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, turnover intention). However, existing literature mainly focused on how emotional exhaustion had a direct impact on the outcome variables, and payed little attention to how mediators or moderators influenced the relationships between emotional exhaustion and its consequences. Specially, researches had not adequately addressed the influence of cognitive processes. In view of this, the research would explore the psychological mechanism of how attributional characteristics influenced the exhaustion-outcome variables relationships from attribution perspective, which not only enriched the contents in attribution field, but also improved the emotional exhaustion research.Based on Weiner (1985)'s attribution theory of motivation and emotion, the research examined the relationships between emotional exhaustion, attributional characteristics (internality, stability, controllability), and outcome variables (affective commitment, job satisfaction, turnover intention), and explored the mediating effects of attributional characteristics on the emotional exhaustion-affective commitment, emotional exhaustion-job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion-turnover intention processes, and also explored the mediating effects of affective commitment and job satisfaction on the relationship between attributional characteristics and turnover intention. The research conducted the questionnaire survey among 206 members from organizations of Zhejiang province. The results revealed that:1) Emotional exhaustion was significantly related to attributional characteristics. Specifically, emotional exhaustion was negatively related to internality of attribution, and positively related to stability of attribution.2) Stability of attribution had a significant negative effect on affective commitment, and stability partially mediated the relationship between emotional exhaustion and affective commitment.3) Stability of attribution had a significant positive effect on turnover intention, and stability partially mediated the relationship between emotional exhaustion and turnover intention.4) Stability of attribution had a significant negative effect on job satisfaction, and stability partially mediated the relationship between emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction.5) Affective commitment had a significant negative effect on turnover intention, and affective commitment partially mediated the relationship between stability of attribution and turnover intention.6) Job satisfaction had a significant negative effect on turnover intention, and Job satisfaction partially mediated the relationship between stability of attribution and turnover intention.