Underemployment, need frustration, and the delayed amplification of meaninglessness in peripheral economies

Purpose This study develops and tests a dynamic deprivation model linking regional underemployment to emotional exhaustion through cumulative psychological need frustration and emergent meaningless work. It examines whether structural labour misallocation predicts intra-individual growth trajectories rather than static strain differences and whether motivational erosion generates nonlinear depletion over time. Design/methodology/approach A three-wave longitudinal panel of 336 employees in peripheral-region small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) was analysed using parallel-process latent growth curve modelling (a statistical technique that tracks how several variables change together over time). Latent intercepts and slopes (respectively, each person's starting level and their rate of change across the three waves) were estimated for psychological need frustration, meaningless work, and emotional exhaustion. Nonlinearity was tested via a latent basis specification, and moderated sequential mediation (a chain of indirect effects whose strength depends on the level of a moderating variable) was assessed using bias-corrected bootstrapping of conditional indirect effects (a resampling procedure used to test whether an indirect effect is statistically reliable). Findings Regional underemployment predicted both the level and growth of psychological need frustration, which sequentially transmitted to growth in meaningless work and accelerated emotional exhaustion. Slope-mediated pathways accounted for substantially greater variance than intercept effects. Perceived organisational support attenuated this growth-based transmission. Originality/value The study advances state-of-the-art theory by repositioning meaningless work from a contemporaneous perceptual state to a cumulative, slope-driven deprivation process rooted in regional labour structures. It integrates macro-level economic misallocation into Self-Determination Theory, identifies psychological need frustration growth as the core transmission mechanism, and empirically demonstrates delayed amplification dynamics that conventional cross-sectional mediation models cannot detect.