Job autonomy
It’s commonly believed that job autonomy has a positive impact on employee wellbeing and protects workers from strain. However, an emerging counter-narrative challenges this assumption and identifies ways in which greater job autonomy has negative impacts, especially for jobs that already have substantial autonomy. New research is contributing to this debate.
A longitudinal study disaggregates stable, between-person variation in job autonomy from dynamic, within-person change in job autonomy over a multi-year period with a sample of Church ministers. They argue that experiencing high and stable job autonomy is conceptually distinct from experiencing an increase in job autonomy; the former being positive for worker wellbeing while the latter often represents a form of role stress.
The researchers developed a two-level model and found that workers with higher job autonomy than others tend to have lower emotional exhaustion at the between-person level. The model evidences the counter-view that within-person increases in job autonomy are followed by greater emotional exhaustion. Implications for extending theory on within-person change in well-being are also discussed.