"Darling, Don’t Think About Work Tonight: The Role of Partners for Employees’ Daily Recovery"

Abstract

This multi-source diary study examined the role of partners for employees’ daily recovery from job stress in a sample of dual-earner couples. We hypothesized that employees’ daily psychological detachment from work during the evening should be positively associated with their partners’ daily psychological detachment during the evening. Employees’ affective well-being (positive and negative affect) at bedtime should be influenced not only by their own psychological detachment, but also by their partners’ psychological detachment. Moreover, we hypothesized that the presence of children in a couple’s household should moderate the relations between partners’ psychological detachment on the one hand, and employees’ psychological detachment and affective well-being on the other hand. Fifty-three dual-earner couples completed daily electronic surveys via handheld devices over the course of one week at bedtime. We used dyadic multilevel path modeling to analyze our data. Results showed that employees’ and their partners’ levels of daily psychological detachment were positively related. Employees’ psychological detachment predicted their own positive and negative affect at bedtime. Partners’ psychological detachment predicted employees’ negative affect only in couples without children. Partners’ psychological detachment was not associated with employees’ positive affect neither for couples with nor without children.