Impact of Employees’ Rumination on Work Engagement: Mediating and Moderating Roles of Emotional Intelligence

Objectives: Work engagement is critical in organizational development as it improves and enhances performance and innovative behavior. Work engagement could be influenced by individual traits, work environment, and other factors. Hence, a need was felt to investigate whether and how rumination, as a personality trait, influences work engagement. Methods: This study expanded on previous research on rumination and work engagement by introducing emotional intelligence to build mediating and moderating models. The study focused on rumination affecting work engagement and explored emotional intelligence for its role in mediating and moderating the relationship between rumination and work engagement. A questionnaire was distributed to a sample of 930 employees of Chinese central enterprises were identified to investigate the relationship between rumination, emotional intelligence, and work engagement. The findings were calculated on Ruminative response scale, Work-engagement scale, and Emotional intelligence scale, Results: Results showed that rumination had a significant negative predictive effect on work engagement (β = –0.35, P < 0.001). Moreover, emotional intelligence mediated (B = –0.39, P < 0.001) and moderated (B = –0.16, P = 0.024) the effect of rumination on work engagement. Conclusion: This study enriches the understanding of work engagement by quantitatively demonstrating the influence of emotional intelligence on the relationship between rumination and work engagement. This study has implications for enterprises to improve the level of mental health and work engagement among their employees.