Promotion and prevention focus on playful work design: the role of inclusive leadership in the relationship between employee thriving and job burnout

In the rapidly evolving workplace, employees need to adopt proactive strategies to thrive and avert job burnout. Playful work design (PWD) offers promising avenues for achieving these outcomes. Yet empirical evidence and its underlying psychological processes warrant further investigation. Building on regulatory focus theory (RFT), we hypothesize that PWD might impact employee thriving at work and job burnout through promotion and prevention focus under the boundary conditions of inclusive leadership. We collected three-wave data from full-time employees (N = 468) in Pakistan. Our results showed that promotion focus mediated the positive relationship between PWD and thriving at work, whereas prevention focus mediated the negative relationship between PWD and job burnout. Inclusive leadership moderated the positive indirect relationship between PWD and thriving at work via promotion focus. It also moderated the negative indirect relationship between PWD and job burnout via prevention focus. The findings of our study contribute to the applications of RFT by suggesting that PWD may function as a proactive self-regulatory process, while also offering actionable insights for managers and practitioners.