Materialism predicts burnout through the basic needs: individual-level and within-person longitudinal evidence

ABSTRACT

Workplace burnout has strong negative consequences for both workers and organisations. Following Self-determination theory (SDT), we hypothesised that workplace materialism – the relative importance given to extrinsic (fame, money, image) versus intrinsic (relationships, pro-sociality, self-development) work goals – is a key antecedent of burnout. The relationship between work goals and burnout is expected to be mediated by lower satisfaction and higher frustration of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Extending previous correlational evidence, we tested the prospective relationships among these constructs using a three-wave longitudinal design among a large sample of Chilean workers (N = 1841). Both individual-level (cross-lagged panel model) and within-person (trait-state-occasion model) longitudinal analyses supported that materialism predicted subsequent levels of burnout through higher need frustration. Need satisfaction did not predict subsequent burnout in either analysis. Additionally, we found that burnout predicted subsequent need frustration, suggesting a dangerous reciprocal relationship between both constructs. Our findings support SDT and highlight the potential risks of emphasising materialism in organisational settings. Indeed, contrary to common organisational practices, our findings suggest that burnout can be reduced by lowering the importance of extrinsic goals, fostering intrinsic goals, and building working environments to avoid frustrating basic psychological needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Employee´s materialism; workplace burnout; need satisfaction; need frustration
• cross-lagged panel model
• trait-state-occasion model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The project collected several other measures, but they are not relevant for the present research (see Reyes et al., 2022; W. Unanue et al., 2019; J. Unanue et al., 2021). Importantly, none of the associations tested here have been published previously.

2 Note that these constraints are applied to the unstandardized paths. Since variances of our measures were not perfectly equal across the three time waves, the corresponding standardized paths for T1 → T2 and T2 → T3 are also expected to differ slightly.

3 This approach is virtually identical to the more recently described multiple indicator RI-CLPM (Mulder & Hamaker, 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID) through a grant received by the Chilean Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation N°21180367 and a grant received by the Chilean Fondo de Fomento al Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (Fondecyt de Iniciación) Project N°11160389.