Mapping impacts of work-leisure imbalance on overall job satisfaction, career development prospects, and future career plan

Grounded in the conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study conceptualizes chronic work encroachment on leisure as an enduring resource-loss spiral in which employees steadily forfeit time, energy, and recovery opportunities. The hypothesized psychological mechanism posits that (a) resource loss from excessive workload elicits affective strain (lower job satisfaction), which (b) fuels cognitive pessimism (diminished career outlook), and (c) culminates in protective withdrawal (plans to change jobs, switch careers, or work abroad). Multistage logit models estimated on data from a large-scale stratified labor-force survey (N = 3753) show patterns of associations consistent with this four-stage sequence. Each one-point increase in work–leisure imbalance is associated with a 0.98% higher probability of job dissatisfaction; dissatisfaction, in turn, is associated with 10.16% higher odds of a bleak career outlook, increasing the likelihood of concrete turnover plans. The spiral is more pronounced among grassroots technical and manual workers, whereas professional, technical, and managerial staff conserve resources by pursuing external mobility or entrepreneurship when promotion stalls. The findings extend COR scholarship to work-life research and reveal parallel prevention and promotion levers for practitioners. Prevention interventions can halt initial resource depletion by regulating workload, limiting after-hours connectivity, and guaranteeing genuine rest periods. Promotion interventions—transparent advancement pathways, skill-building programs, and entrepreneurial support—replenish or expand resources, redirecting employees from defensive withdrawal toward constructive career growth. These insights clarify how resource dynamics link work-life balance, career expectations, and turnover intentions, guiding organizations and policymakers in crafting environments that protect and enhance workers’ resource reservoirs. Innovativeness in this study lies in articulating and empirically estimating a COR-consistent multistage loss-spiral sequence that links work–leisure imbalance to affective job evaluation, forward-looking career appraisal, and subsequent behavioral adaptation, while treating “future career plans” as multiple discrete adaptive options rather than a single turnover proxy and examining occupational heterogeneity within a unified framework using a large-scale stratified labor-force survey.