Abstract
Technology has drastically reshaped the workplace over the past decades. While it provides organizations and their employees a variety of benefits, there is also a growing perception that technological advancements (e.g., the evolution from telephone to smartphone) in the workplace may have a negative impact on employees’ mental health. Using a diary approach, we examined the direct effect of workplace telepressure during off-job hours on psychological detachment from work and the potential mediating role of work-related smartphone use during off-job hours in this relation. In addition, employees’ individual differences in empathy was proposed to act as a cross-level moderator of the relation between workplace telepressure and work-related smartphone use. A sample of 80 employees, representing a wide range of occupations and organizations, completed a daily survey on five successive workdays (N = 337–400 day-level observations). Results of multilevel analyses yielded no direct effect of workplace telepressure on psychological detachment on a day-to-day basis. Yet, the results supported a negative indirect effect of daily workplace telepressure during off-job hours on daily psychological detachment, mediated via daily work-related smartphone use during off-job hours. Additionally, the relation between workplace telepressure and work-related smartphone use was not strengthened by the affective component nor the cognitive component of other-oriented empathy. Our study highlights the importance of a clear organizational policy regarding work-related smartphone use during off-job hours and provides valuable input for strategies aiming to ameliorate employees’ psychological detachment and proper smartphone use.
Highlights
Cambier et al: From Telepressure to Psychological Detachment remarkably (Mazmanian, Yates, & Orlikowski, 2006)
ICT use for work purposes during off-job hours such as replying to work-related messages, and the preoccupation with and urge for sending those replies quickly have been negatively associated with a highly powerful recovery experience: psychological detachment (Barber & Santuzzi, 2015; Grawitch, Werth, Palmer, Erb, & Lavigne, 2018; Santuzzi & Barber, 2018)
As work recovery processes occur mainly during off-job hours and workplace telepressure might substantially differ between work and nonwork hours, the present study investigates workplace telepressure during off-job hours to adequately examine its impact on detachment from work
Summary
Cambier et al: From Telepressure to Psychological Detachment remarkably (Mazmanian, Yates, & Orlikowski, 2006). ICT use for work purposes during off-job hours such as replying to work-related messages, and the preoccupation with and urge for sending those replies quickly (i.e., workplace telepressure) have been negatively associated with a highly powerful recovery experience: psychological detachment (Barber & Santuzzi, 2015; Grawitch, Werth, Palmer, Erb, & Lavigne, 2018; Santuzzi & Barber, 2018). Considering smartphones being the most ubiquitous ICT device nowadays (Steemers et al, 2017), we investigated work-related smartphone use during off-job hours as a potential explanatory mechanism or mediator in this relation, shedding light on how workplace telepressure might influence psychological detachment
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