Background. Millennials. Becoming the largest generation in workforce nowadays. Unfortunately, they were known to switch job more frequently, difficult to manage, even few of them are engaged at work. Those are only a few of many alarming headlines that make HR practitioners did many related studies to understand this generation in their workplace. The previous studies have mentioned such a positive organizational behavior (POB), namely work engagement, is positively oriented human resource strengths, which can be measured and increased for performance improvement in today’s workplace. The study aims to present an application of the job demand-resource (JD-R) model of work engagement. More specifically, testing the moderation effect of quantitative workload on the relationship between job autonomy and work engagement towards millennials in the workplace.

Methods. A cross-sectional study design was used and a non-probability accidental sample of 145 millennials employees in Indonesia was selected. The sample consisted of 63 males and 82 females. A total of 111 (77%) participants was Bachelor’s Degree, the average age of the participants was 28.02 years (SD = 3.22), and the average length of tenure with the company was 3.26 years (SD = 2.46). Each participant completed a questionnaire who had previously been willing to participate in the research and signed the informed consent. The measuring instruments comprise the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) to measure work engagement (α = .89), the Autonomy Task Characteristic from The Work Design Questionnaire to measure job autonomy (α = .91), and the Quantitative Workload Inventory (QWI) to measure quantitative workload (α = .92). The measurements have adapted and translated from English to Bahasa, also through expert judgment by industrial/organizational practitioners. This study used a regression analysis Process by Andrew F Hayes in the first model to test the role of moderator. All statistical techniques performed using IBM SPSS Statistics 24.0.

Results. Following the statistical diagram of model 1, first result showed that job autonomy has a significant effect on work engagement (β = -.79, LLCI = -1.20, ULCI = -.37, p < .01). Second, quantitative workload has a significant effect on work engagement (β = -.63, LLCI = -1.09, ULCI = -.17, p < .01). Third, there is a positive and significant moderation effect of quantitative workload on the relationship between job autonomy and work engagement (β = .23, t = 4.03, p < .01).

Conclusions. The quantitative workload can significantly have a role as a moderator of the relationship between job autonomy and work engagement on millennials employees. Further, job autonomy particularly has a positive impact on work engagement when quantitative workload is high. It means the millennials employees in Indonesia with high quantitative workload will have high work engagement when getting job autonomy in the workplace. It can be concluded that the result supported the hypothesis.

Added-Values. These findings clearly expand the job demand-resource (JD-R) model and suggest that job autonomy as a job resource has salience to increase the millennial's work engagement (especially in Indonesia) in the context of high workload (quantitative workload) as a job demand. The present study showed that the interaction between job demand and job resource is predictive of work engagement. Job demands and job resources should match in other to perform moderating effects in the prediction of well-being. It is important to know the characteristics of millennials employees and the context of the job because either job autonomy or workload can be job demand or job resource, depend on the need of millennials employees. But, job autonomy is not the only job resource that can affect work engagement. The organization can consider other right resources that may increase work engagement among millennials employees (e.g., performance feedback, social support, and supervisory coaching). Hopefully, this study can provide information to organizations to design a right working environment to increase millennial’s work engagement and organization’s performance.