직무요구와 직무소진(Job Burnout) 그리고 조직공정성 요인간의 관계에 관한 연구

Because of highly competitive business environments, many organizations are now introducing new forms of work design and various management reforms such as lean production, organizational downsizing, and business restructuring more than ever before. These initiatives may help to enhance the productivity and competitiveness of the organizations, but simultaneously they may raise levels of job stress, job burnout, and other negative psychological and health-related outcomes among employees. For these reasons, many researchers have focused on the burnout phenomenon which employees experience in their job contexts, and they also have investigated the factors and conditions that contribute to job burnout in a wide variety of service, industrial, and corporate settings. In the nearly three decades since job burnout first entered the management literature, many findings have been cumulated. Specially, many conceptual and empirical studies have shown that burnout has important dysfunctional ramifications, implying substantial costs for both the organizations and individuals. However, according to afore-mentioned research, there may be several job resources that can help to facilitate successful coping with highly demanding jobs, preventing or buffering such potentially harmful effects of these kinds of jobs like job-strain and burnout. Such resources may be located at the level of organization (e.g., salary, job security, career opportunities), interpersonal and social relations (e.g., supervisor and co-worker supports, team climate), and the organization of work (e.g., performance feedback, skill variety, job autonomy etc.). Based on the Equity Theory and Job-Demand Resource Model of burnout, we can also expect that the extent to which employees perceive justice or fairness in their job contexts will have the same attenuating or buffering effect of job resources on their burnout. Although much research has been done on justice perception in the context of organizational reward, performance appraisal and promotion etc., there has been little empirical research that has focused on the role of the justice perception of employees concerning the relationship between job demands and employee burnout. In this respect, the aim of the present study is to test the attenuating effects of justice perception of employees on burnout (i.e., exhaustion and disengagement) and their moderating or buffering role as kinds of job resources in the relationship between the job demands and burnout. The analysis based on data collected from 164 Korean manufacturing workers produced moderately strong evidence in support of our expectations. Most importantly, justice perception affected job burnout negatively. Specifically, we found that the distributive justice which workers felt in the context of their work were negatively related to both dimensions of burnout, i.e., exhaustion and disengagement. In addition, the distributive justice moderated or buffered the negative effects of job demands on the disengagement component of burnout. Meanwhile, interactional justice, which means the quality of interpersonal treatment taken from a supervisor, was negatively related only to the disengagement dimension of burnout, and it did not have any kinds of interaction effect. The implication of these findings for the implementing of high commitment and low-burnout inducing work practices are then discussed. Also, the limitations of this study and future research directions are suggested.