Does wellbeing impact the employee moonlighting and their intentions to quit the organisation? Analysing the mediating role of employee engagement

With the introduction of customised working styles, the human resource management area is changing rapidly. Due to exponential growth of hybrid, virtual and work from home culture, moonlighting, e-lancing and gig working have seen incredible growth in the IT industry. There is a wide range of reasons/motivators why people choose to moonlight, and these reasons ultimately determine whether their moonlighting is going to be permanent or temporary. In this present study, our aim is to examine the contributors/motivators of moonlighting which further lead to employee intention to leave. Based on responses from 430 IT professionals we evaluated five hypotheses to estimate the relationships between the latent dimensions of employees' we being, employee engagement, moonlighting intentions and intention to quit among IT professionals at a subset of Indian businesses. The results reveal that employee wellbeing significantly influences moonlighting intentions negatively. Also moonlighting intentions influence employees' intention to quit positively as per the study. The study also revealed that employee engagement partially mediates the relationship between employee wellbeing and their moonlighting intentions. This posits that employees' wellbeing is crucial for increasing productivity, job satisfaction, engagement level which in turn reduces alternative job search.