Being engaged at work and detached at home: A week-level study on work engagement, psychological detachment, and affect

By Sabine Sonnentag, Eva J. Mojza, Carmen Binnewies, Annika Scholl. 2008

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Although earlier research has shown that work engagement is associated with positive outcomes for the employee and the organization, this paper suggests that employees also need time periods for temporarily disengaging (i.e., psychological detaching) from work. We hypothesized that work engagement and psychological detachment from work during off-job time predict high positive affect and low negative affect and that psychological detachment is particularly important when work engagement is high. Over the course of four working weeks, 159 employees from five German organizations from various industries completed surveys twice a week, at the beginning and the end of four consecutive working weeks. Hierarchical linear modelling showed that a person's general level of work engagement and the week-specific level of psychological detachment from work during off-job time jointly predicted affect at the end of the working week. As expected, work engagement moderated the relationship between psychological detachment and positive affect. These findings suggest that both engagement when being at work and disengagement when being away from work are most beneficial for employees’ affective states.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a4135b68eea6f1012c1e39faa1304abd1b95453

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Resilience, Leadership and Work Engagement: The Mediating Role of Positive Affect (2017, background): “Specifically, researchers have found that work engagement is positively related to job satisfaction and positive affect (Sonnentag et al. 2008).”
Recovery from job stress: The stressor‐detachment model as an integrative framework (2015, background): “Although some studies overcame the obvious shortcomings of cross-sectional designs by temporally separating the measurement of psychological detachment and employee outcomes (e.g., ten Brummelhuis & Bakker, 2012; Sonnentag et al., 2008), causal evidence remains tentative.”
Research on work engagement is well and alive (2011, background): “Highly engaged employees reported lower levels of positive affect at the end of the working week when they were not successful in mentally detaching from work during nonwork time; however, when they mentally detached from work, their level of positive affect at the end of the working week was high (”
How Is Leisure Time Interacting with Nature Related to the Need for Recovery from Work Demands? Testing Multiple Mediators (2010, background): “Thus far, most studies have focused on only one or two of the experiences, and most often only psychological detachment has been the focus (eg, Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005 ; Sonnentag, Mojza, Binnewies, & Scholl, 2008 ).”
Work engagement: Further reflections on the state of play (2011, positive): “Does work engagement only have a detrimental effect on very specific outcomes? Does engagement have a curvilinear relationship with positive outcomes? Or are the consequences of engagement contingent on other factors? Sonnentag, Mojza, Binnewies, and Scholl ( 2008 ) showed that high state work engag”
Recovery experiences as moderators between psychosocial work characteristics and occupational well-being (2009, background): “In the diary study by Sonnentag ( 2003 ), which extended over a period of five consecutive working days, a positive relation between day-level recovery (level of recovery before starting to work) and day-level work engagement (work engagement before leaving the workplace) was detected (see also Son”
Smartphone use and work-home interference: The moderating role of social norms and employee work engagement (2015, background): “Furthermore, Sonnentag et al. (2008) showed in a week-level study that engagement at work and disengagement after work were most beneficial for the affective states of employees.”