Mastery-approach doelen en zelfeffectiviteit als voorspellers van burnout en werkbevlogenheid: De adaptieve rol van het vormen van uitwisselingsrelaties met collega’s

How is work motivation related to the experience of job-related well being? In the present article we investigated this question by looking at the joint relationship of mastery-approach goals and self-efficacy with burnout and work engagement. The results of a cross-sectional investigation among 361 employees in healthcare, ICT services, and other sectors largely confirm our expectation that the relationship between mastery-approach goals and burnout are more strongly negative when levels of experienced self-efficacy were low. Furthermore, when self-efficacy was relatively low, mastery-approach goals and work engagement had a more positive relationship. This joint relation between mastery-approach goals and self-efficacy could be partially explained by the observation that workers with relatively strong mastery-approach goals and high levels of self-efficacy reported to have high-quality exchange relationships with their colleagues. Altogether, these results point at the importance of setting mastery-approach goals in social work settings, especially when experienced levels of self-efficacy are low, because those goals are negatively connected with feelings of burnout and positively with experiencing work engagement.