Switching off mentally: predictors and consequences of psychological detachment from work during off-job time.

By Sabine Sonnentag, U. Bayer. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 2005

831 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Psychological detachment from work refers to the off-job experience of "switching off" mentally. It is hypothesized that a high degree of workload encountered during the work day has a negative impact on subsequent detachment processes and that psychological detachment from work is positively related to well-being. Eighty-seven individuals from various occupations provided questionnaire and daily survey measures over a period of 3 working days. Multilevel analysis showed that workload was negatively related to psychological detachment from work during evening hours. Psychological detachment from work was associated with positive mood and low fatigue. The negative relationship between psychological detachment and fatigue was particularly strong on days with high time pressure.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d7e066e2560942e54b68126cde36981e0a4ec9b

How researchers see this paper

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

In General Health Professions

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Recovery, well-being, and performance-related outcomes: the role of workload and vacation experiences. (2006, background): “The two subscales, Exhaustion (e.g., “During my work, I often feel emotionally drained”) and Disengagement (e.g., “With time, one loses the internal relationship with one’s work”) were each quantified with eight items on 4-point rating scales that ranged from 1 (totally agree) to 4 (totally disagree”
Recovery from work-related effort: A meta-analysis (2018, methodology): “If reliability was reported on a daily level but correlations were reported as the average over multiple days (e.g., Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005), the mean reliability value was used because we were interested in the between‐person correlations.”
Daily recovery from work: The role of activities, effort and pleasure (2011, background): “…research on psychological detachment has generally shown recovery from work to be impeded when workers do not let go of job-related thoughts (e.g., Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005; Sonnentag, Kuttler, & Fritz, 2010), it appears that positive thoughts about work during off-job time have the potential to…”
Recovery as an explanatory mechanism in the relation between acute stress reactions and chronic health impairment. (2006, background): “Sonnentag & Bayer (72) showed that highly educated employees with various professional backgrounds who were able to detach psychologically from work during evening hours reported a more positive mood and less fatigue at bedtime than those who ruminated about work-related issues.”
Smartphone Use, Work–Home Interference, and Burnout: A Diary Study on the Role of Recovery (2014, background): “The vast majority of recovery studies include psychological detachment, which is considered a core component of recovery (e.g. Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005; Sonnentag, Binnewies, & Mojza, 2010; Sonnentag, Mojza, Binnewies, & Scholl, 2008b; von Thiele-Schwarz, 2011).”
Flow at Work and Basic Psychological Needs: Effects on Well‐Being (2017, background): “…& Deci, 2001, p. 142) at a general level, but recent studies have connected life in general and the work domain (e.g., Heller, Watson, & Ilies, 2006; Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005), and well-being has been related to a number of important work outcomes (e.g., job performance, retention,…”
Being There: Work Engagement and Positive Organizational Scholarship (2011, background): “In Chapter 66 of this Handbook, Sonnentag, Niessen, and Ne discuss additional studies (e.g., Kuhnel & Sonnentag, in press; Sonnentag, 2003; Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005; Sonnentag, Binnewies, & Mojza, in press; Westman, 1999) that consistently demonstrate that psychological detachment from work can…”
"Did you have a nice evening?" A day-level study on recovery experiences, sleep, and affect. (2008, background): “Earlier research has shown that psychological detachment is related to affect assessed during the same evening (Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005).”
Waking Up on the Right or Wrong Side of the Bed: Start-of-Workday Mood, Work Events, Employee Affect, and Performance (2011, background): “This resetting can be positive and enriching to work (Greenhaus & Powell, 2006; Rothbard, 2001), as it is in the case of recovery at home (Binnewies et al., 2009; Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005; Westman & Eden, 1997).”
Toward a Mechanism for Secondary Trauma Induction and Reduction: Reimagining a Theory of Secondary Traumatic Stress (2017, background): “Sonnentag and Bayer (2005) define psychological detachment as the off-job action of switching off mentally and not being occupied, physically or mentally, by work-related matters.”
Leaving Work at Work: A Meta-Analysis on Employee Recovery From Work (2019, background): “Additionally, time spent engaging in recovery experiences can induce positive affect even if only serving as a distraction from demands (Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005).”
The impact of autonomy and task uncertainty on team performance: A longitudinal field study (2010, methodology): “In order to test our hypotheses, we adopted an approach similar to that described by Sonnentag and Bayer (2005), in which a null model is first created that contains just the intercept.”
Burnout research: Adding an off-work and day-level perspective (2005, result): “Similarly, another study illustrated that the failure to switch off job-related thoughts and to psychologically detach oneself from work during the evening hours after work resulted in reduced well-being at bedtime ( Sonnentag & Bayer , in press).”