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

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.

Keywords:

• Diary study
• Affect
• Psychological detachment
• Recovery
• Work engagement

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the German Research Community (DFG; SO 295/4-1, 4-2). This grant is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank Franziska Bertram, Claudius Bornemann, Stefanie Ernst, Verena Hahn, Till Kastendieck, Nadja Metzler, Frithjof Müller, Christian Lorenz, Sonja Riefer, Julia Schweda, and Ines Spitzner for support during data collection and Jana Kühnel, Arnold Bakker, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.