Psychological Detachment from Work during Nonwork Time and Employee Well-Being: The Role of Leader’s Detachment

Abstract

Research has shown that psychological detachment from work during nonwork time is an important recovery experience and is crucial for employee well-being. Integrating research on job-stress recovery with research on leadership and employee mental health and well-being, this study examines how a leader's psychological detachment from work during nonwork time directly relates to subordinate psychological detachment from work and indirectly to employee exhaustion and need for recovery. Based on self-report data from 137 employees and their supervisors, this study revealed that leader psychological detachment was related to subordinate psychological detachment and that leader psychological detachment was indirectly related to low subordinate exhaustion and low subordinate need for recovery, also when controlling for negative affectivity and leader-member-exchange. Overall, this study demonstrates that leaders might have an impact on subordinate strain symptoms not only via leadership behavior at work but also via detachment processes during leisure time. These findings suggest that employee recovery processes might not only be regarded as an individual phenomenon, but could be seen as embedded in the larger organizational context.

My Mind is Working Overtime—Towards an Integrative Perspective of Psychological Detachment, Work-Related Rumination, and Work Reflection

“…Burnout is best predicted by combining affective rumination, negative work reflection, and psychological detachment. These findings qualify and extend the bivariate association between detachment [6,40,41] and affective rumination [23,24,25], and problem-solving pondering [42] with exhaustion found in prior research. Whereas Vandevala et al [42] found that detachment adds little to predict exhaustion beyond affective rumination, we found that detachment explains at least a modest portion of additional variance in burnout beyond affective rumination.…”

“…Meta-analytic evidence suggests that psychological detachment will yield a negative association with exhaustion [6]. For instance, a recent study found a moderate negative association between detachment and exhaustion [40], see also the work by the authors of [41]. Furthermore, from the literature reviewed above, we expect that particularly affective rumination will yield a strong positive association to exhaustion due to its affective focus [23,24,25].…”

With Greater Power Comes Greater Stress? Authority, Supervisor Support, and Work‐Family Strains

“…Role blurring activities include sending and receiving work‐related communications outside of normal work hours, multitasking on work and home tasks at the same time, and thinking about job‐related matters outside of regular work time (Schieman & Glavin, 2016). These actions represent ways that work can encroach on nonwork time and impair detachment and recovery from the chronic pressures of the job (Sonnentag & Schiffner, 2019; Voydanoff, 2005a). A conceptually distinct but empirically related construct—work‐to‐family conflict—refers to the process whereby the work role detracts from the finite time, energy, and attention available for the family role (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985).…”

Propiedades psicométricas del Cuestionario de Experiencias de Recuperación en trabajadores argentinos.

“…Although there are undoubtedly contextual factors that help explain these results; work-related health problems represent a transnational and transcultural problem (Bakker & Demerouti, 2013;Carod-Artal & Vázquez-Cabrera, 2012). For this reason, in recent years, researchers from different latitudes started to show interest in the processes of recovery from work-related fatigue and stress, which occur during leisure time, as well as its effects on health, wellbeing and performance at work (Fritz, Yankelevic, Zarubin, & Barger, 2010;Moreno-Jiménez & Gálvez-Herrer, 2013, Sonnentag & Schiffner, 2019.…”