Interventions for improving psychological detachment from work: A meta-analysis.

Abstract

Psychological detachment from work during off-job time is crucial to sustaining employee health and wellbeing. However, this can be difficult to achieve, particularly when job stress is high and recovery is most needed. Boosting detachment from work is therefore of interest to many employees and organizations, and over the last decade numerous interventions have been developed and evaluated. The aim of this metaanalysis was to review and statistically synthesize the state of research on interventions designed to improve detachment both at work and outside of it. After a systematic search (covering the period 1998-2020) of the published and unpublished literature, 30 studies with 34 interventions (N = 3,725) were included. Data were analyzed using a random-effects model. Interventions showed a significant positive effect on detachment from work (d = 0.36) on average. Moderator analyses revealed that it did not matter how the different studies conceptualized detachment but that the context in which detachment was measured (outside or at work) significantly influenced intervention effectiveness. Furthermore, using the stressordetachment model as the organizing framework, we found that while interventions addressing job stressors or altering primary and secondary appraisal were all effective, only the interventions that addressed primary appraisal were more effective than those that did not. Additionally, while the delivery format did not moderate intervention effectiveness, interventions with longer durations and higher dosages were more effective than shorter and lower dosage interventions. Finally, interventions were more effective among older participants and participants with initial health or recovery-related impairments.

How Do Teleworkers and Organizations Manage the COVID-19 Crisis in Brazil? The Role of Flexibility I-Deals and Work Recovery in Maintaining Sustainable Well-Being at Work

“…Our results showed the benefits of the recovery experiences during off-job time as a moderator of organizational arrangements. These results support the positive interaction between work and non-work factors and open avenues for designing interventions to enrich this interaction [81,82]. However, different recovery experiences suggest different outcomes depending on the situation.…”

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

“…Intervention research focusing on workrelated thoughts is so far relatively limited (for a review Karabinski et al, 2021;Lohmann-Haislah et al, 2019;Verbeek et al, 2019;Wendsche et al, 2018aWendsche et al, , 2020. Of the various types of work-related thoughts, detachment and positive work reflection have been most frequently addressed in intervention studies.…”

“…Interventions could be developed that teach people to actively utilize different strategies to either suppress work-related thoughts or to shape their thoughts into functional thoughts (see Karabinski et al, 2021 for a first review of detachment interventions). These individual-level interventions could then be complemented with organizational-level interventions that support functional ways to think about or forget about one's work during off-job time.…”

Difficulties detaching psychologically from work among German teachers: prevalence, risk factors and health outcomes within a cross-sectional and national representative employee survey

“…. Karabinski and colleagues [41] recently reviewed the literature on such interventions. They found that workdirected interventions aiming to reduce job demands have largely not been investigated so far and that average effect sizes are rather low (d = 0.14).…”