Increasing Work Engagement as Social Justice: Reimagining the Four-Quadrant Model of Skill and Challenge for Options to Eliminate Work-Related Exhaustion

Endpoints of a continuous scale have identified the work engagement extremes of psychological flow and burnout. If a scale, employees could hold these experiences simultaneously, to some degree. Instead, there are two types of employees concerning work engagement: those who experience the extremes of psychological flow and burnout, and those who do not. A deductive model concerning General Systems Theory modifies Csikszentmihalyi’s four-quadrant model. It indicates that eliminating burnout requires achieving psychological flow rather than any other form of work engagement. Therefore, not all experiences currently labelled as burnout are such. Considering skill and challenge, apathy, anxiety, and boredom more correctly define these other negative work-engagement experiences. As such, solutions for improving work engagement require: (1) differentiating burnout from other forms of work-related exhaustion concerning employee skill and challenge, (2) interventions promoting the positive aspect of every work engagement type, and (3) abandoning the idea that social justice necessitates all employees achieve psychological flow—instead viewing social justice as achieved work engagement. Relevant work engagement solutions are according to the modified four-quadrant model. This novel perspective offers conceptually simple, research-supported approaches to eliminating burnout and other forms of work-related exhaustion, promoting work engagement as a preferred form of social justice.