Job Satisfaction and Emotional Exhaustion among Private-Sector Employees

Abstract

The restructuring of private-sector work through hybrid arrangements, algorithmic performance monitoring, digital communication, and accelerated productivity expectations has altered the psychological conditions under which employees evaluate their jobs. This study investigates the relationship between job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion while proposing a digitally informed framework capable of detecting employees with elevated exhaustion risk from multidimensional workplace indicators. The central research gap concerns the limited integration of conventional organizational-psychology constructs with interpretable machine-learning approaches that can identify nonlinear combinations of satisfaction, workload, autonomy, managerial support, work–life interference, and digital work pressure. Rather than treating job satisfaction as a single protective variable, the proposed study conceptualizes satisfaction as a multidimensional occupational resource whose components may differ in their association with emotional exhaustion.