The importance of sleep and recovery for work-related well-being and performance
In times of long work hours and increasing work intensification (Kelliher & Anderson, 2010; OECD, 2018), recovery from job-related stress is of crucial importance for employees. Recovery is the process of psychophysiological unwinding that counteracts the strain process triggered by demands, and is important to sustain employees’ health, well-being, and performance (Sonnentag, Venz, & Casper, 2017). The current symposium consists of diverse studies investigating the relevance of both off-the-job and on-the-job recovery for work-related well-being and performance, and brings together researchers from six different countries.
Employing a diverse set of longitudinal and diary designs, the six studies in this symposium will reveal how employees’ recovery activities and recovery experiences promote work-related well-being and performance. More specifically, the studies draw attention to sleep as a crucial recovery activity, to vacations and short breaks from work as important recovery opportunities, and to psychological detachment as important recovery experience. By looking on the importance of sleep, recovery opportunities, and recovery experiences for diverse indicators of well-being and performance, the authors of the studies show that recovery matters not only for well-being during non-work time, but also for on-the-job experiences and behaviors.
The first study in this symposium is from Christine Syrek and colleagues. In a longitudinal study with 274 white-collar workers, they investigated whether vacations are related to changes in creativity, and whether recovery experiences during vacations modify vacations’ effect.
The second study is from Wladislaw Rivkin and Stefan Diestel. In a daily diary study with 51 participants over ten workdays, they investigated the day-specific energetic and motivational mechanisms that link sleep duration to work engagement.
The third study in this symposium is from Despoina Xanthopoulou and colleagues. In their daily diary study, they focused on social media use during work breaks – an activity that has become very popular. In a sample of 41 employees who answered questionnaires during one workweek, they tested whether social media use is related to subsequent recovery and well-being during and after work.
The forth study in this symposium – authored by Stefan Diestel and Elvira Radaca – looks on sleep quality, creativity, and work-related well-being. In a daily diary study with 119 employees and four measurement occasions during each workday, they focused on how sleep quality is related to flow experiences and vitality during the day and subsequent creativity at work.
The fifth study in this symposium is from Jana Kühnel and colleagues. In a longitudinal study with 155 employees, they investigated whether the shift to daylight saving time is related to impairments in employees’ sleep and work engagement, and whether effects are more severe for later chronotypes.
Angela Kuonath and colleagues author the sixth study in this symposium. In a longitudinal study with 713 judges, they investigated whether surface acting is a risk factor for judges that threatens their workability in terms of increased emotional exhaustion and decreased work engagement, and whether psychological detachment serves as a protective factor.
The chair of this symposium will encourage participation of the audience by inviting questions after each presentation.
Introduction: The goal of this empirical study was to investigate employees’ creativity before and after their vacation. Specifically, we analyzed employees’ employees’ self-reported creativity as well as observer-rated creativity (fluency, cognitive flexibility, originality). To examine the relationship between recovery and changes in creativity, we follow Newman, Tay and Diener’s (2014) model to differentiate between six recovery experiences (i.e. detachment, relaxation, autonomy, mastery, meaning, affiliation). In this study, theories and methodological approaches are derived from tourism research, leisure sciences and psychology and aim to connect research fields and build bridges between hitherto only loosely connected areas of expertise.
Method: The Alternative Uses Test was applied to assess observer-rated creativity. We developed a longitudinal research design with repeated measurements before, during and after a vacation period. Multilevel modeling was used to analyze the relationship between recovery experiences and creativity within persons as well as between persons. The study encompassed data from 274 white-collar workers.
Results: Analyses showed that employees subjectively perceive their creativity to be lower after vacation, whereas observer-rated indicators of creative performance suggest that they generate more original ideas than before vacation. Within persons, detachment was significantly and negatively related to subjective creativity (i.e. during times in which employees perceived difficulties detaching from work, they perceived their creativity to be higher compared to points in time in which they detached better), while mastery experiences explained interindividual differences in creativity (i.e. employees who generally experienced more mastery reported higher creativity compared to employees with fewer mastery experiences).
Discussion: Our analyses showed a discrepancy between employee’s self-reported and observer-reported creativity after vacation: Employees subjectively perceive their creativity to be lower, whereas observer-rated creativity indicators suggest that they generate more original ideas. This study provides a nuanced picture of the intraindividual changes in creativity across a vacation period and indicates that employees may benefit from their vacation in terms of creativity. More research is needed to understand the underlying processes, which affect changes in creativity across longer leisure time periods.
Previous research identified sleep as a processes of energetic resource recovery, which facilitates work engagement. While there is consistent evidence for the beneficial effects of sleep quality findings on the relation between sleep duration and work engagement are mixed. Moreover, the day-specific mechanisms underlying this relation remain largely unexplored. Finally, identifying boundary conditions, of the relations between sleep and work engagement may help employees and organisations alike to alleviate the impact of insufficient sleep.
In the present study, we aim to extend research linking sleep duration to work engagement by exploring first the shape of the recovery function of sleep, second the interplay of energetic resource availability and motivational processes linking sleep to work engagement, and third personal boundary conditions, which help maintain work engagement even during states of low energy availability due to insufficient sleep. Therefore, we integrate notions about sleep as a process of homeostatic recovery, the broaden and build theory of positive emotions, self-determination theory, and trait self-control to develop a conceptual model in which a) there is a concave relation between day-specific sleep duration and morning positive affect, b) morning positive affect and basic needs satisfaction (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) jointly mediate the day-specific relation between sleep duration and work engagement, and c) person-level trait self-control moderates the relation between morning positive affect and basic needs satisfaction and thus the concave mediation model.
We test our model in a daily diary study across 10 days with a sample of N=51 employees. Our findings reveal that the concave mediating effect of morning positive affect and basic needs satisfaction, which links sleep duration to work engagement is moderated by trait self-control.
Subsequently, we discuss theoretical and practical implications as well as limitations of the study.
Introduction: Social media usage is a popular activity that employees engage in on a daily basis. Work breaks offer an opportunity to go online and use services such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, the evidence so far is inconclusive as to whether social media use during work breaks is favorable or unfavorable for employee functioning. To shed light on these inconclusive findings, in this diary study we focused on the degree to which social media use during breaks concerns work- or non-work-related (i.e., personal) issues. Our aim was to test whether work- and non-work social media use during work breaks relate differentially with recovery during and after work, and whether employee well-being during work (i.e., exhaustion and work engagement) mediates this process. Drawing upon the effort-recovery model and the recovery literature, we hypothesized that social media use for work-related purposes during work breaks will inhibit, while social media use for personal purposes will facilitate the state of recovery after the breaks. In turn, employees, who manage to recover successfully after their breaks, will be more engaged and less exhausted at work and consequently, will experience a lower need for recovery at the end of their shift. Finally, we hypothesized that reduced need for recovery after work will relate with successful recovery before bedtime.
Method: Forty-one employees completed a general survey and a daily diary for three to five working days, twice per day: at the end of their shift and before bedtime. Data were analyzed with multi-level analysis.
Results: Results showed that using social media for work-related purposes during work breaks was unrelated to the state of recovery after work breaks, while using social media for non-work purposes related positively to the state of recovery after breaks. Social media use for personal purposes during breaks related negatively to exhaustion during work through the successful recovery after breaks, while social media use for work purposes during breaks had a direct negative relationship with work engagement. Successful recovery after work breaks related negatively to exhaustion during work, which consequently, resulted in a lower need for recovery at the end of the workday. Finally, need for recovery at the end of the workday related negatively to recovery at bedtime.
Discussion: Our findings advance previous studies on the role of social media usage during work breaks by highlighting the importance of accounting for the content of use in order to understand when these activities facilitate and when they inhibit employee functioning. Also, we found that employee well-being during work, and particularly exhaustion, is the core mechanism that links recovery during work breaks and recovery during leisure. The reliance on self-report data and the fact that break-related experiences were assessed at the end of the workday (and not right after each break) are important study limitations. This study underscores the importance of social media use during work breaks not only for employee functioning during work, but also after work is done.
On the basis of a daily diary study with ten working days, we analyzed a multilevel moderated mediation model, which predicts mediating effects of flow-experiences in the positive relations of sleep quality to day-specific creativity and vitality as well as moderating effects of day-specific mindfulness on the positive relations of sleep quality to flow-experiences and flow-experiences to both outcomes. Our predictions derive from Personality-System-Interaction theory and recent models on sleep quality, according to which recovery processes of sleep quality facilitates autonomous regulation at work as reflected by integrative as well as holistic information processing and subjective vitality. In addition, mindfulness as a form of receptive awareness and present-oriented consciousness stabilizes well-being, even in cases of low availability of regulatory resources, and allows for translating processes of flow into creative thinking. In line with our predictions, data from 119 employees (697 data points) from different occupational and organizational contexts show that sleep quality of the last night (measured at the morning) exerts significant indirect effects on creativity (measured at the evening) and vitality (measured at the afternoon) via flow-experiences (measured at the midday). Moreover, we identified differential patterns of moderating effects of daily mindfulness (measured at the morning) on the positive relations of flow-experience to both outcomes: whereas the positive effect of flow on vitality was attenuated as a function of mindfulness, the positive impact of flow on creativity was amplified as a function of mindfulness. However, contrary to our predictions, no interaction effect of sleep quality and mindfulness on flow were found. The differential moderating effects of mindfulness provide important insights into underlying psychological mechanisms of the integrative self and associated processes of protective resilience during self-regulation at work. Our findings imply that sleep quality and mindfulness should be facilitated through appropriate training programs, to prepare employees for complex task, which require high creativity, and to ensure psychological well-being, even when flow experience is low.
Around 70 countries around the world observe daylight saving time (summer time) and set clocks ahead one hour in spring. With the current study, we investigate whether the shift to daylight saving time matters for employees’ sleep and their work engagement, and whether some people are more affected than others. We expected that employees report worse sleep and lower work engagement after the shift to daylight saving time. Moreover, we hypothesized that harmful effects should be especially strong for later chronotypes, so-called “night owls”. One-hundred-and-fifty-five full-time employees participated in the field study. They answered six questionnaires around the shift to daylight saving time in 2019: two on the weekend before the shift to daylight saving time, two on the weekend of the shift, and two on the weekend after the shift. Results from multilevel analyses showed a decrease in sleep quality and work engagement after the weekend of the shift to daylight saving time. One week after the shift to daylight saving time, sleep quality was still negatively affected, whereas work engagement was not. In line with expectations, the impact of the shift to daylight saving time on work engagement was more pronounced for later chronotypes. Contrary to expectations, we did not find chronotype-specific effects for sleep quality. Results of this study imply that the transition from standard time to daylight saving time has an adverse impact not only on private life but also on working life.
Behaving in line with occupational or organizational emotional display rules is a key requirement for employees in merely any profession that includes the frequent interaction with people. This often brings along a considerable amount of effort - also referred to as emotional labour (Grandey, 2000) - as the emotions that have to be shown overtly do not necessarily have to match those felt by the employee. A profession that, until now, has largely been neglected in the context of emotional labour is that of being a judge. Despite being confronted with highly emotional situations judges need to keep composed and stay neutral which surely constitutes an emotionally highly demanding work situation.
One way of easily coping with the discrepancy between the emotions that are felt and the emotional display that has to be shown is by applying surface acting (i.e., faking one’s emotions to the outside without truly changing one’s emotion; Grandey, 2000; Hochschild, 1983). Surface acting has been shown to bring along an array of negative work-related consequences (e.g., Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002). At the same time, this adverse coping strategy often cannot be avoided due to occupational or situational factors and may even play a prominent role for judges as it has been shown to be especially relevant when confronted with neutral display rules (Trougakos, Jackson & Beal, 2011). Thus, identifying protective factors that buffer negative consequences of surface acting is of special importance. Besides personal and occupational factors that already have been identified to act as a boundary condition in the functioning of surface acting (Grandey, Fisk, & Steiner, 2005; Chi, Grandey, Diamond, & Krimmel, 2011) we argue that identifying malleable factors is a crucial addition to prior research. This is why we focus on detachment that - as a central recovery experience which can be trained (Hahn, Binnewies, Sonnentag, & Mojza, 2011) - should interrupt rumination on negative affective experiences and thus counteract the maladaptive functioning of surface acting over time.