Investigating daily abusive supervision as antecedent of subordinates' low psychological detachment and relaxation during nonwork time: A diary study.

Recovery from work is highly relevant for employees, yet understanding the interpersonal antecedents of impaired recovery experiences remains unclear. Specifically, because former research neglected supervisor behaviors as a predictor of impaired recovery and abusive supervision is a core stressor, we examine daily abusive supervision as a predictor of subordinates' recovery experiences (i.e., psychological detachment and relaxation). We draw on research on the recovery paradox and propose that psychological detachment and relaxation will be impaired on days with high abusive supervision, although recovery would have been highly important on those days. We suggest a cognitive mechanism (via rumination) and an affective mechanism (via anger) to explain this paradox. We test coworker reappraisal support as a moderator that buffers the adverse effects of abusive supervision on rumination and anger. In a daily diary study (171 subordinates, 786 days), we found an indirect effect of abusive supervision on psychological detachment via rumination and indirect effects of abusive supervision on psychological detachment and relaxation via anger. Coworker reappraisal support moderated the association of abusive supervision and rumination, such that the relationship was weaker when coworker support was high. Our results suggest that including negative supervisor behaviors, such as abusive supervision, in recovery research is highly relevant. Coworkers can help cognitively process abusive-supervision experiences by providing reappraisal support. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Eat healthy, feel better: Are differences in employees' longitudinal healthy-eating trajectories reflected in better psychological well-being?

Eating healthily in terms of fruit and vegetable consumption has beneficial effects for employees and their organisations. Yet, we know little about how employees' eating behaviour develops over longer periods of time (trajectories) as well as about how subgroups of employees in these trajectories differ (trajectory classes). Gaining such insights is critical to understand how employees address healthy eating recommendations over time as well as to develop individualised interventions that also consider the development of healthy eating (i.e. improvement versus impairment beyond mean levels). We analysed panel data (Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences) from 1054 employees by means of growth mixture modelling. Our analyses revealed three relevant classes of healthy-eating trajectories: a favourable trajectory class, an unfavourable trajectory class and a strongly improving trajectory class. Furthermore, unfavourable healthy-eating trajectories were especially critical with respect to impaired psychological well-being. Specifically, we found robust results for impaired positive and negative affects, but not for self-esteem, in the unfavourable trajectory class. We discuss limitations and implications of these findings, thereby encouraging research and practice to further consider such fine-grained approaches (i.e. focusing on subgroups within a larger population) when addressing healthy-eating promotion over time.

Healthy and successful: Health-behavior goal striving in daily work life.

Health behaviors (physical activity and healthy eating) can be an essential part of everyday work life and are relevant for employees' affective states. Many worksite interventions, including goal-striving approaches, have been developed to promote health behavior at work. However, these approaches often neglect that making progress with respect to health-behavior goals necessarily takes place during workday episodes, so that work tasks are accomplished simultaneously. In our study, we aim to advance the understanding of how health-behavior goal progress is facilitated and how reflecting on it evokes affective states-taking into account simultaneous pursuit of work-task progress. We collected daily diary data from 205 employees on 1399 days. Analyses showed that goal importance positively predicted health-behavior goal progress, which in turn positively predicted pride and negatively predicted shame at the end of the workday. The negative relation between health-behavior goal progress and shame was stronger on days with low work-task progress, implying compensatory effects. Work-task progress did not moderate the relation between health-behavior goal progress and pride. We discuss the theoretical and practical relevance of integrating research on multiple goal striving when promoting health behavior in daily work life by means of goal-striving techniques.

Daily trajectories of evening recovery experiences and their role for next-day mood.

Focusing on the definition of recovery as a process, we examined how the four core recovery experiences (i.e., psychological detachment, relaxation, control, and mastery) develop during the evening. We tested whether the specific developments of recovery experiences are important for next-day favorable mood states-beyond the mean levels of recovery experiences. We collected data from 92 employees who completed daily morning and afternoon surveys over 10 workdays. In the morning surveys, we implemented the day-reconstruction method to assess detailed information about employees' recovery experiences during several episodes of the previous evening. Our final data set included 477 morning surveys with a total of 1,998 episodes and 383 afternoon surveys. Multilevel growth curve analyses showed that, in general, psychological detachment, relaxation, and control follow a positive linear trend and mastery a negative quadratic trend during the evening. Moreover, path analyses showed that the day-level increase of psychological detachment is important for next-day mood. Specifically, we found that after evenings during which employees experienced a higher increase in psychological detachment than they usually did, they had higher favorable mood states in the subsequent afternoon. Further, our results did not support associations between day-level slopes of relaxation, control, and mastery as well as next-day mood. Hence, our study demonstrates that recovery experiences systematically change during an evening and that this change is partially relevant for next-afternoon mood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

It's a match: The relevance of matching chronotypes for dual-earner couples' daily recovery from work.

Cohabiting dual-earner couples are increasingly common. However, previous recovery research mainly focused on employees independently of others, thereby overlooking an essential part of their life. Therefore, we take a closer look at dual-earner couples' recovery processes and link this research to a circadian perspective. We assumed that unfinished tasks impede engagement in time with the partner (absorption in joint activities, directing attention toward the partner) as well as recovery experiences (detachment, relaxation), whereas engagement in time with the partner should boost recovery experiences. Integrating a circadian perspective, we proposed that employees from couples with matching circadian preferences (chronotype) benefit more from engagement in time with their partner (i.e., stronger relationships with recovery experiences). Additionally, we explored whether a match between partners' chronotypes buffers the negative relationship between unfinished tasks and engagement in joint time. We conducted a daily diary study with 143 employees from 79 dual-earner couples, providing data on 1,052 days. A three-level path model showed that unfinished tasks were negatively related to absorption in joint activities and detachment, whereas absorption positively predicted recovery experiences. Furthermore, the couples' chronotype match mattered in the interplay with engagement in joint time: for couples with higher (vs. lower) chronotype match, experiencing detachment depended on absorption while for couples with lower (vs. higher) chronotype match, attention was even harmful for experiencing relaxation. Thus, it is crucial to consider employees' partners when investigating their recovery processes because employees cannot act independently if they also need to take their partner's circadian rhythms into account. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Sleep has many faces: The interplay of sleep and work in predicting employees' energetic state over the course of the day.

Sleep affects employees' functioning. In this study, we differentiate biological (chronotype), quantitative (daily sleep duration), and qualitative (daily sleep quality) sleep characteristics and examine their relationship with the trajectory of employees' vigor over the course of the day. Building on the two-process model of sleep regulation and the job demands-resources model, we examine whether sleep characteristics are differentially related to the trajectory of vigor as an energetic state. Furthermore, we expect that favorable sleep characteristics have a protective function during the workday in the interplay with daily job demands (workload) and job resources (autonomy). We conducted an experience-sampling study across ten workdays with three daily measurement occasions (171 employees, 1,631 days, 4,351 measurement occasions). Multilevel growth curve modeling showed that, on average, vigor followed a positive quadratic daily trajectory, mainly characterized by a decrease in vigor over the course of the day-after a slight increase early in the day. The decrease in vigor was particularly strong after nights with high sleep quality and for employees with an early chronotype. However, the relation between sleep quality and decrease in vigor occurred only on days with high workload. These results emphasize the importance of looking at the differential effects of sleep characteristics and on-the-job experiences on employees' energetic state during the day. These findings provide helpful suggestions on how to structure work and leisure time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Determinants of workers' well-being during the COVID-19 outbreak: An exploratory study.

Inspired by the Conservation of Resource theory (Hobfoll, 1989), this study investigated the role of a broad set of personal vulnerabilities, social, and work-related stressors and resources as predictors of workers' well-being during the COVID-19 outbreak. Participants were 594 workers in Italy. Results showed that personality predispostions, such as positivity, neuroticism and conscientiousness as well as key aspects of the individuals' relationship with their work (such as job insecurity, type of employment contract or trust in the organization) emerged as factors promoting (or hampering) workers' adjustment during the COVID -19 outbreak. Interactions between stressors and resources were also found and discussed. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-021-02408-w.

Conquering unwanted habits at the workplace: Day-level processes and longer term change in habit strength.

Although habits are a well-researched topic within psychology, habits enacted at the workplace received limited attention in the organizational literature. In this article we examine habits that employees show at the workplace. Because workplace habits are not always functional for performance or affective outcomes, and because employees themselves may regard specific habits as undesirable, it is important to identify ways of how employees can abandon such unwanted habits. We report findings from a daily-survey study (N = 145 persons) in which we examined if self-regulatory processes predict disengagement from undesirable habits and engagement in more desirable alternative behaviors. Multilevel path analysis showed that day-specific implementation intentions and day-specific vigilant monitoring were negatively related to day-specific habitual behavior and positively related to day-specific alternative behaviors, both in the morning and in the afternoon. Analysis of follow-up data (N = 126 persons) showed that change in habit strength was stable over a 2-month period, suggesting that implementation intentions, vigilant monitoring, and the associated enactment of alternative behavior indeed may help to disengage from unwanted habits, particularly with respect to task-related habits and when consistency in vigilant monitoring is high. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

To Detach or Not to Detach? Two Experimental Studies on the Affective Consequences of Detaching From Work During Non-work Time.

Previous correlational studies have shown that both psychological detachment from work and positively thinking about work during non-work time are associated with favorable affective states. In our research we integrate these contradictory findings and add more rigor to detachment research by using an experimental design. In two experimental studies conducted in the laboratory, we manipulated two different kinds of detachment from work (thinking about a hobby; explicit detachment instruction) and three different kinds of thinking about work (thinking negatively, thinking positively, thinking in an unspecific way) by short written instructions. Results show that both detachment strategies lead to a reduction in negative affect (in both studies) and to an increase in positive affect (in one study). The effect of detachment was particularly strong when it was contrasted with thinking negatively about work and when end-of-workday negative affect was high. In some of the comparisons, the affective benefits of positively thinking about work were stronger than those of psychological detachment from work. Taken together, our studies demonstrate that detachment from work as well as positive thinking improves subsequent affect, highlighting the causality underlying the association between psychological detachment from work - as a core recovery experience - and subsequent affective states.

Relaxation during the evening and next-morning energy: The role of hassles, uplifts, and heart rate variability during work.

Being able to psychologically relax after work in the evening is important to the day-to-day recovery process and should enable employees to wake up feeling energized for the next workday. Drawing on affective events theory and allostatic load theory, we expected that employees will be able to psychologically relax when they get home from work if during work (a) they experienced less work-related goal-frustration events and more work-related goal-achievement events and (b) if they were adaptively regulating physiological stress arousal (as indexed by heart rate variability). As such, this research considers that work events, as well as a physiological indicator of parasympathetic regulation, can be important antecedents to off-the-job recovery. Over the course of 5 consecutive workdays, 72 employees completed daily surveys (on waking, at work, and in the evening) and wore an ambulatory electrocardiograph to measure their heart rate variability while at work that afternoon. Multilevel mediation analyses revealed support for our hypotheses at the within-person level, except for the role of goal-attainment events. The finding that goal-frustration events and heart rate variability both contribute to evening relaxation, and then indirectly to next-morning energy, provides initial insights on how both mind and body impact off-the-job recovery. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychological Detachment from Work during Nonwork Time and Employee Well-Being: The Role of Leader's Detachment.

Research has shown that psychological detachment from work during nonwork time is an important recovery experience and is crucial for employee well-being. Integrating research on job-stress recovery with research on leadership and employee mental health and well-being, this study examines how a leader's psychological detachment from work during nonwork time directly relates to subordinate psychological detachment from work and indirectly to employee exhaustion and need for recovery. Based on self-report data from 137 employees and their supervisors, this study revealed that leader psychological detachment was related to subordinate psychological detachment and that leader psychological detachment was indirectly related to low subordinate exhaustion and low subordinate need for recovery, also when controlling for negative affectivity and leader-member-exchange. Overall, this study demonstrates that leaders might have an impact on subordinate strain symptoms not only via leadership behavior at work but also via detachment processes during leisure time. These findings suggest that employee recovery processes might not only be regarded as an individual phenomenon, but could be seen as embedded in the larger organizational context.

Patterns of positive and negative work reflection during leisure time: A latent profile analysis.

This study examined positive and negative work reflection during leisure time from a person-centered perspective using latent profile analysis. First, we examined whether quantitatively and qualitatively different work reflection profiles exist. Second, we investigated whether persons with different work reflection profiles differ in energetic well-being (i.e., exhaustion and vigor). We collected data from 1,036 young employees who answered 3 surveys with a time lag of 3 months each. We established the profile solution at the first measurement point and tested for differences in well-being at the second and third measurement point. We identified 6 work reflection profiles with 2 profiles displaying unbalanced levels of positive and negative work reflection (positive reflectors and negative reflectors) and 4 profiles displaying balanced levels of positive and negative work reflection (nonreflectors, low reflectors, moderate reflectors, and high reflectors). Analyses showed that persons differed significantly in energetic well-being depending on profile membership, with positive reflectors experiencing the highest well-being and negative reflectors experiencing the lowest well-being. Persons with balanced reflection profiles did not differ from one another in well-being. Our results provide new insights into the interplay of positive and negative work reflection during leisure time and its associations with employee well-being. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychological detachment from work during nonwork time and employee well-being: the role of leader's detachment

Research has shown that psychological detachment from work during nonwork time is an important recovery experience and is crucial for employee well-being. Integrating research on job-stress recovery with research on leadership and employee mental health and well-being, this study examines how a leader's psychological detachment from work during nonwork time directly relates to subordinate psychological detachment from work and indirectly to employee exhaustion and need for recovery. Based on self-report data from 137 employees and their supervisors, this study revealed that leader psychological detachment was related to subordinate psychological detachment and that leader psychological detachment was indirectly related to low subordinate exhaustion and low subordinate need for recovery, also when controlling for negative affectivity and leader-member-exchange. Overall, this study demonstrates that leaders might have an impact on subordinate strain symptoms not only via leadership behavior at work but also via detachment processes during leisure time. These findings suggest that employee recovery processes might not only be regarded as an individual phenomenon, but could be seen as embedded in the larger organizational context

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Illegitimate tasks reach into afterwork hours: A multilevel study.

This study examines illegitimate tasks as a specific type of job stressors. Illegitimate tasks comprise unreasonable and unnecessary tasks and refer to inappropriate task assignments that go beyond an employee's role requirements. Building on the stressor-detachment model, we hypothesized that illegitimate tasks experienced during the day predict high negative affect and low self-esteem at the end of the workday, which in turn should predict poor psychological detachment from work during evening hours, resulting in sustained high levels of negative affect and low self-esteem at bedtime. Over the course of 1 workweek, 137 employees completed daily surveys at the end of the workday and at bedtime (total of 567 days). Multilevel path modeling revealed a distinct pattern of findings at the day and the person level. At the day level, unnecessary tasks predicted high negative affect and low self-esteem at the end of the workday, with low self-esteem predicting poor psychological detachment from work during afterwork hours. Poor psychological detachment predicted a further increase in negative affect and a decrease in self-esteem over evening hours. At the between-person level, unreasonable tasks were related to high negative affect and low self-esteem at the end of the workday, with negative affect being related to poor psychological detachment from work. Overall, the findings demonstrate that illegitimate tasks are associated with unfavorable states at the end of the workday and are indirectly related to poor psychological detachment from work, undermining recovery from the stressful events experienced at work. (PsycINFO Database Record

A sorrow halved? A daily diary study on talking about experienced workplace incivility and next-morning negative affect.

Incivility by coworkers and customers can have detrimental consequences for employees' affective well-being at work. However, little is known about whether incivility also impairs employees' affect at home and how long these negative effects may last. In this diary study, we examine whether incivility by coworkers and customers is related to next-morning negative affect via negative affect at the end of the workday and at bedtime, and investigate different modes of social sharing (i.e., conversations about experienced mistreatment) as day-level moderators of this relationship. Daily diary data collected over 10 workdays (N = 113 employees) revealed that coworker incivility was indirectly related to bedtime negative affect via negative affect at the end of the workday, and customer incivility was indirectly related to next-morning negative affect via negative affect at the end of the workday and at bedtime. Although we found no moderating effect for conversations in an affective sharing mode (i.e., conversation partners provide comfort and consolation), the relationship between workplace incivility and employees' negative affect was buffered by conversations in a cognitive sharing mode (i.e., conversation partners suggest alternative explanations or reappraisal of uncivil behavior). In line with social sharing theory, our results suggest that talking about experienced mistreatment can, under specific circumstances, offset the negative relationship of uncivil coworker and customer behavior and employees' negative affect. This study advances current research on workplace incivility by studying negative affect 3 times a day and thus sheds light on the mechanism connecting workplace incivility and employees' affective well-being at home. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Advances in recovery research: What have we learned? What should be done next?

Job-stress recovery during nonwork time is an important factor for employee well-being. This article reviews the recovery literature, starting with a brief historical overview. It provides a definition of recovery that differentiates between recovery as a process and recovery as an outcome. Empirical studies have shown that recovery activities (e.g., physical exercise) and recovery experiences (e.g., psychological detachment from work) are negatively associated with strain symptoms (e.g., exhaustion) and positively associated with positive well-being indicators (e.g., vigor). Recovery activities and recovery experiences suffer when employees face a high level of job stressors. Psychological mechanisms underlying recovery seem to be similar across different temporal recovery settings (e.g., work breaks, free evenings, vacations) and seem to be enhanced in natural environments. Intervention studies have pointed to a diverse set of strategies for how everyday job-stress recovery can be supported. This article discusses 5 avenues for future research, with a particular focus on individual and contextual factors that may influence recovery as well as highlighting more complex temporal patterns than those uncovered in previous research. (PsycINFO Database Record

Stress and well-being at work: A century of empirical trends reflecting theoretical and societal influences.

In various forms, research on stress and well-being has been a part of the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) since its inception. In this review, we examine the history of stress research in JAP by tracking word frequencies from 606 abstracts of published articles in the journal. From these abstracts, we define 3 eras: a 50 year-era from 1917 to 1966, a 30-year era from 1967 to 1996, and a 20-year era from 1997 to the present. Each era is distinct in terms of the number of articles published and the general themes of the topic areas examined. We show that advances in theory are a major impetus underlying research topics and the number of publications. Our review also suggests that articles have increasingly tended to reflect broader events occurring in society such as recessions and workforce changes. We conclude by offering ideas about the future of stress and well-being research. (PsycINFO Database Record

Distal and proximal predictors of snacking at work: A daily-survey study.

This study aimed at examining predictors of healthy and unhealthy snacking at work. As proximal predictors we looked at food-choice motives (health motive, affect-regulation motive); as distal predictors we included organizational eating climate, emotional eating, and self-control demands at work. We collected daily survey data from 247 employees, over a period of 2 workweeks. Multilevel structural equation modeling showed that organizational eating climate predicted health as food-choice motive, whereas emotional eating and self-control demands predicted affect regulation as food-choice motive. The health motive, in turn, predicted consuming more fruits and more cereal bars and less sweet snacks; the affect-regulation motive predicted consuming more sweet snacks. Findings highlight the importance of a health-promoting eating climate within the organization and point to the potential harm of high self-control demands at work. (PsycINFO Database Record

Coming back to work in the morning: Psychological detachment and reattachment as predictors of work engagement.

Research has shown that recovery processes in general and psychological detachment in particular are important for work engagement. We argue that work engagement additionally benefits from reattachment to work in the morning (i.e., mentally reconnecting to work before actually starting to work) and that the gains derived from psychological detachment and reattachment are stronger in the morning than in the afternoon. We tested our hypotheses in a daily diary study with a sample of 167 employees who completed 2 surveys per day over the period of 2 workweeks. Hierarchical linear modeling showed that work engagement was higher in the morning than in the afternoon. Evening psychological detachment and morning reattachment positively predicted work engagement throughout the day. The association between reattachment and work engagement was stronger in the morning than in the afternoon. This study demonstrates that not only psychological detachment from work during leisure time, but also reattachment to work when coming back to work are crucial for daily engagement at work. (PsycINFO Database Record

Exhaustion and lack of psychological detachment from work during off-job time: moderator effects of time pressure and leisure experiences.

Lack of psychological detachment from work during off-job time contributes to the increase in employee exhaustion over time. This study examines the reverse causal path from exhaustion to lack of psychological detachment, suggesting that this reverse process may operate within a relatively short time frame. Specifically, we examine if exhaustion predicts a decrease in psychological detachment from work during off-job time within several weeks. We propose that time pressure at work intensifies and that pleasurable leisure experiences reduce this association between exhaustion and the decrease in psychological detachment. We tested our hypotheses in a short-term prospective study (time lag: 4 weeks) with a sample of 109 employees. Ordinary least square regression analysis indicates that exhaustion predicted a decrease in psychological detachment from work over the course of 4 weeks. This decrease was particularly strong for employees working under time pressure and for employees who did not engage in pleasurable leisure experiences. Our findings suggest that exhausted employees find detachment from work increasingly difficult and therefore might suffer from insufficient recovery-although they need it most. The situation is particularly severe when exhausted employees face high time pressure and a lack of pleasurable leisure experiences.