Abstract
Organizations increasingly use Health Self-Management Applications (HSMAs) that provide feedback information on health-related behaviors to their employees so that they can self-regulate a healthy lifestyle. Building upon Self-Determination Theory, this paper empirically investigates the basic assumption of HSMAs that their self-management feature provides employees with autonomy to self-regulate their health-related behavior. The two-phase experimental study contained a 4-weeks HSMA intervention in a healthcare work environment with a feedback factor (performance vs. developmental) and pretest and posttest measurements of participants' perceived autonomy. Following the experiment, interviews were conducted with users to gain an in-depth understanding of the moderating roles of feedback and BMI (a proxy for health) in the effects of HSMA on perceived autonomy. Findings reveal that the use of an HSMA does not significantly increase perceived autonomy, and may even reduce it under certain conditions. Providing additional developmental feedback generated more positive results than performance feedback alone. Employees with higher BMI perceived a greater loss of autonomy than employees with lower BMI. The reason for this is that higher-BMI employees felt external norms and standards for healthy behavior as more salient and experienced more negative emotions when those norms are not met, thereby making them more aware of their limitations in the pursuit of health goals.
Highlights
To increase overall productivity and decrease workforce costs, organizations are increasingly embracing workplace health promotion programs as a critical strategy for improving employee health and work outcomes [1, 2]
We tested whether the participants in the performance feedback group systematically differed from the participants in the developmental performance group with respect to their scores on the demographics of gender, age, organizational tenure, experience with Health Self-Management Applications (HSMAs), education level, and body mass index (BMI), and on the study variables of work health autonomy and home health autonomy at the pretest measurement point (T1)
BMI, Developmental Feedback, and Home Health Autonomy we focus on employees with high BMIs who received developmental feedback, and we aim to shed light on why their perceived autonomy to self-regulate their health in their private time declined, while it remained stable in working hours
Summary
To increase overall productivity and decrease workforce costs, organizations are increasingly embracing workplace health promotion programs as a critical strategy for improving employee health and work outcomes [1, 2]. These programs tend to focus on individual health factors, such as diet and physical exercise, and represent a broad range of disease prevention, and health promotion methods such as health checks [3], gym subscriptions [1], physical activity [e.g., [4,5,6]], and vitality training [2]. The literature on HSMAs and employee autonomy is inconclusive with several gaps addressed by this research
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