related matters outside of working hours. Employees
will think about existing events related to work, such
as unfinished tasks, problems to be solved,
relationships with colleagues, or negative events at
work, as well as anticipate possible or upcoming
events, needs, and problems at work. Based on this,
affective rumination was introduced into the study as
a mediator variable. Relevant studies have shown that
the high performance expectations of leaders are one
reason for intensifying affective rumination (Perko,
et al, 2017, Syrek 2014). When employees are faced
with high performance expectations from leaders,
they may fall into anxiety due to the difficulty of tasks
and the uncertainty of the possibility of task
completion, which induces affective rumination and
affects employees' work engagement.
When studying transformational leadership,
Podsakoff et al. (1990) pointed out that the essence of
transformational leadership is that these leaders
"promote employees to extraordinary levels and
make them do more and perform better than
expected", and believed that transformational
leadership has six key behaviors (Podsakoff et al
1990). High performance expectation is one of them.
Reviewing previous literature, the connotation of
high performance expectations can be divided into
two categories: one is high performance expectations
from the outside (usually from superior leaders),
which means that superior leaders have high
expectations on the performance of their
subordinates, such as doing their best to achieve the
best performance, leading the performance ranking,
etc. The other is internal high performance
expectation, that is, employees' high performance
expectation for themselves, which refers to the
internal motivation of employees to voluntarily
achieve high performance and make contributions to
the organization, including high performance
tendency and high performance goal setting. The high
performance expectations of leaders defined in this
study comes from the outside, that is, the high
performance expectations of superior leaders on their
subordinates, and refers to the behavior of superior
leaders on their subordinates to pursue excellence,
quality and high performance expectations
(Podsakoff, et al, 1990). At present, there are
relatively few researches on high performance
expectations of leaders. Based on the review of
relevant domestic and foreign research literature, it is
found that the existing research on high performance
expectations of leaders focuses on the exploration of
its outcome variables, such as job performance,
territorial behavior, and pro-organizational unethical
behavior.
Rumination, which was first proposed based on
research on depression, is thought to be a form of
negative repetitive thinking that worsens depressive
symptoms. Most subsequent studies have followed
this line of thinking, viewing rumination as a
repetition of negative experiences, and have been
shown to be associated with depression, loneliness,
anxiety, anger and other negative emotions, as well as
sleep disturbances. Affective rumination is a
cognitive state characterized by intrusive, pervasive,
and recurring negative thoughts about work
(Pravettoni, et al, 2007). The focus is not on problem
solving, but more similar to recurring thoughts
described in the clinical literature that, if allowed to
develop, can lead to negative emotional reactions
such as depression and annoyance. At present, most
of the researches on rumination are foreign ones, but
domestic ones are relatively scarce. Affective
rumination occurs more when employees are faced
with challenging job demands (Van Laethem, et al,
2019). Ruminating on negative aspects of your job
can lead to negative emotions, such as depression.
Affective rumination has been shown to lead to
higher levels of job burnout and fatigue, and lower
levels of job engagement and vitality (Kinnunen, et
al, 2019).
The concept of work engagement has been put
forward for many years, but scholars have not
concluded a unified view on the connotation and
structure of work engagement because they consider
it from different perspectives based on personal
understanding and research needs. According to the
existing research, the dimensional division of work
engagement proposed by Schaufeli et al. (2002) has
been widely adopted and used in research (Schaufeli,
et al, 2002). Work engagement under this definition
is a general and persistent state of emotional
cognition that does not focus on specific goals,
transactions, individuals or activities. This research
adopts Schaufeli et al. (2002) to study the connotation
interpretation of work engagement (Schaufeli, et al,
2002). Through literature review, it is found that most
of the current studies on the anzac variables of work
engagement focus on individual trait factors and job
organization factors, while the studies on the outcome
variables of work engagement can be divided into
two categories: individual-related results and job-
related results. At present, studies on the antecedent
and outcome variables of work engagement are
relatively prosperous, but there are relatively few
studies on leadership behavior in the exploration of
antecedent variables. Therefore, this study, starting
from the high performance expectations of leaders,
Research on the Influence Mechanism of High Performance Expectations of Leaders on Employees’ Work Engagement based on the