Get a taste of your leisure time: the relationship between leisure thoughts, pleasant anticipation, and work engagement

ABSTRACT

During the working day, employees do not only think of their work but also occasionally of their upcoming leisure time. Accordingly, we introduce two constructs, namely thoughts of leisure time (ToLT) and thoughts of a planned leisure activity (ToPLA). We assumed that employees report more ToLT/ToPLA at the beginning and the end of the working day. We further hypothesized that employees with higher pleasant anticipation of a planned leisure activity generate more ToPLA. As leisure thoughts distract attention from work, we expected a negative relationship between ToLT/ToPLA and work engagement within one hour and across the working day. Regarding the subsequent hour, we assumed that when the leisure plan is positive/negative, the relationship between ToPLA and work engagement is positive/negative. We conducted an hourly online-survey across one working day (N = 89 employees, 438 measurement points). Our results revealed the expected time trend for ToLT/ToPLA and a positive relationship between pleasant anticipation and ToPLA. We further found negative relationships between ToPLA and work engagement (within one hour) and between ToLT and work engagement (across the day). Contrary to our expectations, for positive leisure plans, the relationship between ToPLA and work engagement in the subsequent hour was negative.

KEYWORDS:

• Leisure thoughts
• pleasant anticipation
• leisure time
• work engagement
• hourly measurement

Acknowledgments

We thank Antje Schmitt for her helpful comments and stimulating discussions on leisure thoughts. We thank Julia Köbler and Alexander Sadi for their help with data collection, and Caroline Becker, Isabella Hebel, and Lennart Pötz for conducting the interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. We use the term off-task thoughts. However, leisure thoughts can also be described as one special type of mind wandering, spontaneous thoughts or daydreaming (for an overview see Marchetti et al., 2016).

2. We also tested different models with the other types of thoughts as control variables. In sum, when adding on-task thoughts and one (or more) other types of thoughts, only on-task thoughts were significantly positively related to work engagement (between-person and within-person). In models without on-task thoughts and two or three other types of thoughts no significant relationships between any type of thoughts and work engagement were found.

3. We thank the editor for the helpful suggestion on additional analyses.

4. By contrast, pleasant anticipation did not moderate the relationship between ToPLA and work engagement (γ = −0.06, SE = 0.04, p = .090, Pseudo R² = .02).

5. Although only eight participants met the criteria for the 10th percentile indicating neutral and negative leisure plan valence ratings (< 5.00), we tested the simple slope, b = 0.08, SD = 0.06, t = 1.196, p = .234.

6. When adding one or more other types of thoughts as control variables, the interaction term remained significant. Independently of the other types of thoughts, on-task thoughts within persons were significantly related to higher work engagement in the subsequent hour.