Beginning the workday yet already depleted? Consequences of late-night smartphone use and sleep

By Klodiana Lanaj, Russell E. Johnson, Christopher M. Barnes. 2014

667 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Smartphones have become a prevalent technology as they provide employees with instant access to work-related information and communications outside of the office. Despite these advantages, there may be some costs of smartphone use for work at night. Drawing from ego depletion theory, we examined whether smartphone use depletes employees’ regulatory resources and impairs their engagement at work the following day. Across two studies using experience sampling methodology, we found that smartphone use for work at night increased depletion the next morning via its effects on sleep. Morning depletion in turn diminished daily work engagement. The indirect effects of smartphone use on depletion and engagement the next day were incremental to the effects of other electronic devices (e.g., computer, tablet, and television use). We also found some support that the negative effects of morning depletion on daily work engagement may be buffered by job control, such that depletion impairs work engagement only for employees who experience low job control.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4252f33913dd69d1ab1f55482b82f92c28f301c0

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Citations in the corpus

Thriving at work but insomniac at home: Understanding the relationship between supervisor bottom-line mentality and employee functioning (2020, background): “Instead, employees may continuously attend to work-related matters even while in bed, which can disrupt their sleep quality (Lanaj et al., 2014).”
Conducting Clinical Research Using Crowdsourced Convenience Samples. (2016, background): “Consequently, waves of data can be collected from workers over a period of days, allowing for diary studies and other forms of experience sampling (Boynton & Richman 2014, Lanaj et al. 2014, Usinger 2014).”
Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of Research Exploring the Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning (2017, background): “…effect on cognitive performance (Lim and Dinges, 2008), and considerable evidence implicates smartphone technology as a source of sleep disturbances (Cain and Gradisar, 2010 for a review), with a compound effect on cognitive functioning and work engagement the following day (Lanaj et al., 2014).”
Smartphone usage in the 21st century: who is active on WhatsApp? (2015, background): “Moreover, smartphone overuse (in particular evening usage) seems to be associated with poor sleep quality [5] and reduced work engagement [6], which is not surprising, as new numbers show that about 36–40% of smartphone owners use their smartphone in the last 5 min before going to sleep and/ or in…”
Is Consistently Unfair Better than Sporadically Fair? An Investigation of Justice Variability and Stress (2017, methodology): “For testingmoderatedmediation, we extended the above procedure to test indirect effects where the magnitude of the first-stage coefficientwas calculated at lower (21 SD) and higher (11 SD) values of the cross-level moderator (Koopman et al., 2016; Lanaj et al., 2014).”
Emotional Mechanisms Linking Incivility at Work to Aggression and Withdrawal at Home: An Experience-Sampling Study (2018, methodology): “We tested this hypothesis again following the method recommended by Preacher et al. (2010) and recently implemented by Lanaj et al. (2014).”
Customer Mistreatment: A Review of Conceptualizations and a Multilevel Theoretical Model (2015, background): “In addition, Lanaj, Johnson, and Barnes (2014) have demonstrated that when employees did not get enough sleep the previous night they felt depleted in the morning and were D ow nl oa de d by U ni ve rs ity o f Fl or id a, M s Ja cl yn K oo pm an n A t 1 0: 38 1 0 Ju ne 2 01 5 (P T ) subsequently…”