Personal goal facilitation, burnout and work engagement: the role of self-discrepancy.

Employment is an important means to achieving meaning in life and personal development (). However, overwhelming work responsibilities can hinder our capacity to fulfil other meaningful life goals. In the extreme, it may lead to burnout—a negative psychological syndrome in response to chronic stressors experienced at work, characterized by feelings of emotional exhaustion, having detached relationships with clients and colleagues, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment (). A close counterpart is work engagement—a persistent positive state defined by vigor, dedication, and absorption (). In the absence of burnout, employees can feel engaged at work, even when they are expending significant time and effort in their work (). Most research has examined how burnout and work engagement are linked to the degree of fit experienced at work, conceptualized as perceived mismatches between job demands and resources (i.e., ), or misalignments between individual traits and the organization (; ). However, much less research has investigated fit with employees’ personal goals. The current research examined whether and how the perception of personal goal facilitation through work (PGFW) predicts burnout and work engagement. The person-job fit perspective of burnout posits that employee well-being varies not only with job demands, but also whether demands are misaligned with employees’ expectations (). Therefore, the greater the misalignment, the greater the likelihood of burnout or low work engagement. Such mismatches may occur in any of the six identified domains, namely workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values ().