Sustaining employees thriving at work through polychronicity and work engagement: The unintended (negative) consequence of training

Abstract Research on thriving has garnered significant scholarly attention. Yet, knowledge is lacking on the role that polychronicity plays in leveraging the hard work and dedication of frontline employees to acquire and utilize new knowledge and skill sets needed to thrive at work, and the condition under which this is expected to occur. We draw on the socially embedded model of thriving to examine how frontline employees' polychronic proclivities elicit their thriving at work (i.e. learning) through work engagement mechanism and the boundary condition of the unintended (negative) consequence of training. We examine our hypotheses based on a unique multi‐wave and multi‐source data from 261 frontline hotel employees and their colleagues in 10 four‐star hotels in Ghana. Results indicate polychronicity's direct and indirect (via work engagement) effect on the learning facet of thriving at work. The strength of the direct effect of polychronicity on work engagement is offset and the indirect effect is attenuated by the unintended (negative) effect of the training frontline employees receive from their hotel organizations. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, with limitations and several suggestions made for future research endeavours.