Is Daily Workplace Anxiety Adaptive?A Regulatory Model of Email Activity, Goal Progress, Performance

Abstract

Despite workplace anxiety being a common experience of daily work life, past research has primarily examined its effects at the between-person level of analysis, documenting detrimental effects of state or trait anxiety. This research considers the experience of day-to-day workplace anxiety, and how employees manage their work performance on days they experience workplace anxiety. Drawing on workplace anxiety and affect-as-information frameworks, we consider an adaptive regulatory process model of daily workplace anxiety, where workplace anxiety initiates work e-mail activity, a self-regulatory behavior underlying an engagement function of workplace anxiety. Work e-mail activity facilitates work goal progress, which enhances performance. Utilizing a multi-level, time-lagged experience sampling field study across 10 workdays (Level 1 N = 809; Level 2 N = 96), we demonstrate support for our theorized model. On days when employees experience workplace anxiety, their performance (in-role and extra-role) is enhanced through behavioral regulatory activity manifested in work e-mail activity, which promotes work goal progress. This serial indirect effect is strengthened for employees with higher (vs. lower) work e-mail centrality. Further, these results hold alongside tests of a maladaptive response to workplace anxiety via non-work e-mail activity that disengages employees from work. This research points to the adaptive function of day-to-day workplace anxiety, suggesting that employees are active, rather than passive, drivers of their experiences of daily workplace anxiety.