Emotional Exhaustion and Work Performance: A Field Experiment on the Moderation Effect of Physical Activity Gamification

Abstract

There are two objectives of this study. First, we hypothesize that physical activity would be a possible moderator of the relationship between emotional exhaustion and work performance (exhaustion-performance relationship) described in the job burnout literatures. Second, we extend the literature on Self-Determination Theory and Motivational Affordances in the gamified mobile health (mHealth) application context. To the best of our knowledge, this may be the first study to examine the impacts of physical activity gamification for alleviating the negative exhaustion-performance relationship. In this study, the mHealth application, named “CityU Walk” was developed. A longitudinal field experiment and survey, with about 400 participants, were conducted to test the hypotheses. Our findings support all our proposed hypotheses. Taken together, this study first reveals that the exhaustion-performance relationship is moderated by a recommended physical activity threshold (150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity or equivalent) that health effects on people will be occurred. Second, this study shows that the combined gamified “team” and “accomplishment” feature would be the most effective design to motivate emotional exhausted people to do more physical activity.

Date of Award	3 Aug 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Chi Wai Ron KWOK (Supervisor)