While many employees read and respond to work-related e-mails in the evenings after work, the mechanisms through which after-hours e-mailing influences wellbeing remain poorly understood. In particular, there has been limited consideration of whether different characteristics of after-hours e-mails (frequency, duration, perceived tone) may trigger work-related rumination that influences employee wellbeing at bedtime (i.e., the end of the post-work period). To address this gap in the literature, data were collected from 59 employees during a 5-day daily survey period. We expected after-hours e-mail frequency, duration, and perceived tone to indirectly relate to employee vigour and fatigue at bedtime (two common well-being criteria) via affective rumination and problem-solving pondering (two major forms of work-related rumination). Our results indicated that a more negatively perceived after-hours e-mail tone influenced both vigour and fatigue via affective rumination.Further, our findings suggested diverging implications of after-hours e-mailing frequency and duration for problem-solving pondering, with longer duration and more frequent after-hours e-mailing co-varying with higher and lower levels of this form of rumination, respectively. These findings demonstrate the importance of considering various characteristics of after-hours e-mailing and corresponding implications of work-related rumination when studying employee well-being.
Although workplace age discrimination research has been recognized as increasingly important, much less agreement has been reached regarding the operationalization and measurement of age discrimination. There are multiple age discrimination scales, yet no systematic investigation of potential convergence across those scales exists. We conducted two investigations of age discrimination scales that differ in multiple measurement characteristics (e.g., content domain). Findings of confirmatory factor analyses from Study 1 (N = 248) indicated that although different age discrimination scales were related to the same higher-order construct, they were not interchangeable as they each accounted for idiosyncratic measurement variance. The usage of different scales resulted in different magnitudes of the relationships between age discrimination and its correlates. In addition to the replication of these results in Study 2 (N = 939), an item response theory approach was applied to demonstrate that different age discrimination scales possess different levels of test information at different places of the latent trait continuum. Taken together, our findings provide implications for researchers to thoughtfully choose their operationalization of age discrimination.
Although past research has found that professional isolation can affect discernible work‐related outcomes (e.g. job performance and turnover) and important job attitudes, researchers have not examined its impact on those less discernible but still costly work behaviours. Drawing on self‐regulation theories, this study examined the effect of professional isolation on employees' cyberloafing and time theft through self‐control capacity impairment. With longitudinal data collected from 343 U.S. employees across five consecutive weeks at the early stage of the pandemic (i.e. from mid‐March to late April 2020), our results of latent change score modelling analyses found that professional isolation change was positively related with changes in cyberloafing and time theft via change in self‐control capacity impairment. The results increase our understanding of the hidden performance cost of professional isolation. This research also shifts the research focus from a static, between‐person perspective to dynamic, within‐person changes in professional isolation and related outcomes. The findings shed light on the self‐regulation perspective in understanding the harmful consequences of professional isolation. Implications for future research are discussed along with practical implications for organisations.
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