The Effect Of Work Overtime On Work Engagement:A Moderated Mediation Model

With the rapid development of the domestic economy and society,enterprises are facing fierce market pressure.Out of the pursuit of economic benefits,work overtime has become the norm in some industries and positions.Since the "996.ICU" project in 2019,the 996 work mode of going to work at 9 a.m.and leaving get off work after 9 p.m.has aroused extensive discussions and controversies.This culture is not limited to typical Internet companies in China,but has gradually penetrated into China’s job market.The issue of work overtime in various industries has intensified,and the public’s resistance to abnormal overtime culture has never stopped.Regardless of the social background,the consensus on work overtime is that excessive overtime work is related to the physical and mental health of workers,and may even lead to a series of social problems.Considering the negative impact caused by overtime,it is urgent to explore the relationship between work overtime and employees’ working state.As a practice of positive psychology in work context,work engagement emphasizes the relationship between individuals and work,and explains how to make employees use resources to maximize their effectiveness,and to work healthily and happily with a positive mental state,which is a good indicator for predicting the future performance of organizational members.However,employees who worked overtime the day before may affect their work engagement on the following day,manifesting as fatigue and lack of concentration,etc.In view of the objective reality that overtime is common in organizations,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to further explore the impact of overtime on employee work engagement.However,most of the existing research on work overtime tends to be static research,and there is little research on the dynamic perspective of overtime,that is,the dynamic relationship between work overtime and employees’ work status.At the same time,most of the previous related research focused on the direct effects of overtime,but the internal mechanism and boundary of work overtime were not fully explored.Therefore,based on the effort recovery model and conservation of resource theory,this paper explores the relationship between work overtime,state of being recovered,and work engagement at the within-person level,and the cross-level moderating effect of employee trait self-control at the between-person level.This paper adopted the experience sampling method and used existing measurement tools to conduct a follow-up survey for a period of 10 working days.A total of 75 valid data at the between-person level and 698 valid data at the within-person level were obtained.Using IBM SPSS Statistics 23.0 and Mplus8.0 for empirical analysis,the results showed that:(1)Work overtime is negatively related to state of being recovered of employees;(2)The state of being recovered of employees on working days can positively predict the work engagement on the day;(3)The state of being recovered of employees indirectly mediates the negative relationship between work overtime and employee work engagement;(4)Trait self-control moderates the negative relationship between work overtime and state of being recovered of employees across levels,that is,the higher the level of employee trait self-control,the weaker the negative relationship between work overtime and the next day’s state of being recovered;(5)Trait self-control cross-level moderates the indirect effect of employees’ state of being recovered on the relationship between work overtime and employee work engagement,that is,the higher the level of employee trait self-control,the weaker the indirect effect of the employees’ state of being recovered.Therefore,this paper verified the dynamic influence of work overtime and employees’work engagement and the moderating role of personality factors in the Chinese organizational context,enriched and expanded the research in the field of work overtime and recovery,and provided management practice enlightenment.The innovations of this paper are as follows:First,scholars at home and abroad have achieved considerable results in the exploration and research of work overtime,but most of them focus on the direct impact of overtime work on employees’ physical and mental health,work performance,etc.There is a lack of a complete internal mechanism to connect them to explain the impact of work overtime on work status.Therefore,this paper has made innovations in model construction and introduced the variable "state of being recovered" to explore the hysteresis effect of work overtime on the previous day on the individual’s work engagement the next day,providing an accessible research perspective for the field of work overtime,and fully revealed the internal mechanism of work engagement fluctuations.At the same time,the personality trait variable of "trait self-control" was introduced at the between-person level,which expand the boundary condition research on the mechanism of work overtime influence.Second,with regard to research methods,most of the existing research explores the impact mechanism of work overtime and employee behavior from the between-person static perspective,and the research from the within-person level dynamic perspective is relatively limited.Since employees’ working status is fluctuating,studying the effect of work overtime only from an between-person perspective cannot reveal its mechanism well.In view of this,under the background of chinese enterprise organizations,this paper adopts the experience sampling method to capture the changes of employees’ state of being recovered and work engagement within 10 working days from a dynamic perspective,so as to further enrich and expand the related research on work overtime.