SELF-EMPLOYED AND WORK-RELATED WELLBEING A comparative study between self-employed and organizational employees on burnout and engagement using Job Demand-Control-Support model

Abstract

This study employed the Job demands-control-social (JDCS) Model (Karasek & Theorell, 1990) on sample of 487 Chinese self-employed workers (n=243) and organizational workers (n=244), with the aim to examine the two types of employees’ working conditions to their consequential work-related well-being (i.e. burnout and work engagement). The T-test result demonstrates that self-employed workers do not have more active jobs, in fact self-employed workers have the same job control but receive significantly less job demands than organizational workers, however the difference in job demands does not explain the current finding on self-employed workers experiencing less burnout, and such finding happens to contradict the claims from previous existing studies in Western context. Moreover, the observed increase in engagement for self-employed workers likely comes from a different source rather than having an active job. Multiple regressions with all three predictors and their interaction terms are performed, and the result remains consistent with the JDCS model and fully confirmed the three-way buffer hypothesis in Chinese context. The between-groups data suggest that JDCS model has less influential power among self-employed workers than among organizational workers. In particular, social support in the workplace enhances work engagement and reduces burnout more effectively in organizational workers than in self-employed workers.