The Art of Designing Work: Work/Family Interface as a Mediator in the Relationship between Work Design, Burnout, and Performance

Abstract

Because of the massive changes experienced within work contexts over the last decades, work design has received renewed attention both from scholars and practitioners interested in carefully balancing job demands with employees’ needs, aiming to boost performance. Hence, work design, meant as a strategic human resource management tool to craft job context and content, has been proven to impact on work performance and burnout. However, despite this evidence, the literature clearly explaining the paths through which work design might lead to positive or negative organizational outcomes is still scarce. To address this gap, the present study investigated the contribution of work–family interface aspects (i.e., work–family conflict and work–family enrichment) as mediators in this relationship. The participants were 160 white-collar employees, invited to fill in an online survey encompassing socio-demographical information (e.g., age, gender, education, and professional role) and individual self-report responses on the study variables (i.e., work design, work/family conflict, work/family enrichment, burnout, and work performance). The path analyses were conducted to investigate the direct and indirect relationships among constructs. The results showed that work–family conflict mediated the relationships between some work design characteristics and burnout, whereas work–family enrichment had a mediating role in the paths leading both to burnout and to work performance. The implications for research and practice were discussed with respect to an evidence-based human resource management perspective.

Keywords

• work design
• work performance
• burnout
• work/family interface