Take a break! Benefits of sleep and short breaks for daily work engagement

ABSTRACT

The current study investigates the benefits of a good night’s sleep and short work breaks for employees’ daily work engagement. It is hypothesized that sleep and self-initiated short breaks help restore energetic and self-regulatory resources which, in turn, enable employees to experience high work engagement. A daily diary study was conducted with 107 employees who provided data twice a day (before lunch and at the end of the working day) over 5 workdays (453 days in total). Multilevel regression analyses showed that sleep quality and short breaks were beneficial for employees’ daily work engagement. After nights employees slept better, they indicated higher work engagement during the day. Moreover, taking self-initiated short breaks from work in the afternoon boosted daily work engagement, whereas taking short breaks in the morning failed to predict daily work engagement. Taking short breaks did not compensate for impaired sleep with regard to daily work engagement. Overall, these findings suggest that recovery before and during work can foster employees’ daily work engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Work breaks
• sleep
• work engagement
• recovery
• energy management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Job control was assessed with three items capturing autonomy in scheduling and two items capturing autonomy in task organization. When examining the correlations between taking breaks and the two facets of job control separately, autonomy in scheduling was significantly related to taking breaks at the within-person level (for taking breaks in the afternoon: r = .11, p = .025, N = 453) and at the between-person level (for taking breaks in the morning: r = .24, p = .013, N = 107; for taking breaks in the afternoon: r = .19, p = .046, N = 107). Autonomy in task organization was not significantly related to taking breaks.