Description
Employees in fast-paced work environments are required to juggle various demands throughout the workday that can impact their levels of burnout, job satisfaction, and work engagement. Polychronicity, or a preference for multitasking, helps individuals to effectively switch between tasks and may serve to help employees manage their increased workloads in fast-paced environments. This study examined how polychronicity influences the relationship between the demands of workload, role overload, and role conflict to assess whether individuals who prefer multitasking feel that they are better equipped to overcome demands and therefore experience lower levels of burnout and higher levels of job satisfaction and work engagement. The present study included 152 participants who were surveyed through Prolific, an online crowdsourcing service that has emerged as an alternative to Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants were required to be at least 18 years of age, employed in the United States, and working at least part-time. Results indicated that role overload and role conflict were both positively related to burnout and negatively related to job satisfaction. Role conflict was negatively related to work engagement. However, workload was not significantly related to any of the outcomes. Further examination showed workload was positively related to the exhaustion dimension of burnout, but not the disengagement dimension. Additionally, curve estimations of workload suggested that a potential curvilinear relationship may exist between workload and the outcomes. There was insufficient evidence for the moderating effect of polychronicity between the job demands and work outcomes. However, plots of the relationships suggest that some interactions may exist if a larger sample were utilized. Despite the lack of evidence to support the moderation hypotheses, this study suggests that future research should examine whether polychronicity can act as a buffer in the relationships between work demands and job outcomes.
