Coworker support and its relationship to allostasis during a workday: A diary study on trajectories of heart rate variability during work.

Abstract

In this study, we investigate autonomic nervous system regulation during a regular workday and how coworker support relates to this allostatic system. We first examined the trajectory of the heart rate variability (HRV) as an indicator of autonomic nervous system activation throughout the workday. Furthermore, we proposed that coworker support is directly related to the typical autonomic regulation of the workday and facilitates a stable high parasympathetic and low sympathetic activation level during the workday. We conducted a 5-day daily diary study with 115 employees, measuring their coworker support at the end of the day and their HRV during work. We examined the effect of stable between-coworker support on the latent growth curve of HRV during work and found evidence for the stabilizing effect of general coworker support on HRV trajectory. Employees with higher coworker support, on average, had a high, stable parasympathetic and low, stable sympathetic level during work. Employees with low support showed an inverted, U-shape trajectory of the parasympathetic activation throughout the workday, with low parasympathetic activation at the beginning and end of the workday and a maximum in the middle of the workday during lunch break time. Thus, we offer initial evidence for a regulating effect of coworker support on allostasis in terms of a trajectory in actual working conditions.

Personal Resources and Organizational Outcomes: Sex as a Moderator of the Complex Relationships Between Self-Esteem, Heart Rate Variability, and Work-Related Exhaustion

“…It is likely that perceived social support may help to explain variations in individual responses to stressors and their well-being at work, as well as results on HRV in women. Of interest, low social support was found to lead to higher variance in the HRV trajectory, compared with high social support (Baethge et al, 2020). Future studies are certainly needed to clarify the causal mechanisms underlying the role of self-esteem in sex differences in the physiological response to job-related daily stressors.…”

Always on, never done? How the mind recovers after a stressful workday?

“…The research on recovery from work highlights that recovery can be understood as a process in which physiological or psychological strain reactions revert to a hypothetical baseline level (McEwen, 1998). However, only few studies have investigated recovery as a process nested in time (for an exception see Baethge et al, 2020;Syrek et al, 2018). More research that investigates the development over time in recovery-related constructs (e.g.…”

Flattening the Latent Growth Curve? Explaining Within-Person Changes in Employee Well-Being during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Our competing hypotheses proposed that as the pandemic progressed, either job-related burnout and psychological symptoms would increase over time (Hypothesis 1a; i.e., the stress-reaction model), or that job-related burnout and psychological symptoms would decrease over time (Hypothesis 1b; i.e., the adaptation model). We tested these hypotheses using latent growth modeling (LGM), which allowed us to examine the effects of time on the outcome variables (Baethge et al, 2020;Duncan et al, 2013;Preacher et al, 2008). Systemic within-person change across the five time points was examined by specifying latent intercept, linear slope, and quadratic growth factors for each of the dependent variables, and then estimating the means and variances of these latent terms.…”