Relationship between teachers' workaholic characteristics and emotional exhaustion - the mediating role of work-family conflict and work efficacy and the moderating role of teaching age

This paper expands on the previous research on the relationship between workaholic characteristics and individual emotional exhaustion, and studies the influence of workaholic characteristics on emotional exhaustion and its internal mechanism from the new perspectives of utility theory and conservation of resources theory. Based on a questionnaire survey of 3892 rural teachers in China, this paper first constructs a model of the influence of workaholic characteristics on emotional exhaustion, and finds that the two have the stable quadratic relationship. Workaholic characteristics will reduce emotional exhaustion, but when it exceeds the certain level, workaholic characteristics will no longer reduce emotional exhaustion or even aggravate emotional exhaustion, and moderate workaholic characteristics will minimize emotional exhaustion. The increase in teaching age slows down the threshold of the "U-shaped" curve between workaholic characteristics and emotional exhaustion. By constructing a moderation mediation model, it is found that work-family conflict and work efficacy partially mediate the relationship between workaholic characteristics and rural teachers' emotional exhaustion, and work-family conflict and work-efficacy promote and inhibit the effects of workaholic characteristics on rural teachers' emotional exhaustion, respectively. Moreover, teaching age negatively moderated the indirect effect of rural teachers' workaholic characteristics on emotional exhaustion through work-family conflict, and novice teachers in rural areas were more susceptible to the emotional exhaustion caused by work-family conflict.