Small Move Big Impact: The Ripple Effects of Employees' Sleep Deprivation between Work and Family

Abstract

Despite that sleep has long been recognized as one of the fundamental physiological needs for human survival, the emerging sleep dilemma among employees — sleep is always being first sacrificed for coping with the onerous burdens of work and family demands — has attracted extensive attention to scholars and practitioners. To tackle this puzzle, we aim to find out how and when lack of sleep (i.e., sleep deprivation), in the short run, triggers employees' subsequent reactions, particularly at the workplace and home. Drawing from ego depletion theory and conservation of resource theory, we developed a dual-path model of ripple effects of employees' sleep deprivation on workplace depletion and work-family conflict. Through a daily diary study using data collected from 109 full-time employees with 524 workday observations in Chinese, we demonstrated employees' sleep deprivation was positively related to their next workday's emotional exhaustion and cognitive fatigue at workplace. Through these affective and cognitive approaches, deprived employees were found to engage in more work-(to)-family conflicts on the next workday's evening. Furthermore, employees' high work-family centrality aggravated employees' sleep deprivation's undesirable impacts on their next workday's workplace emotional exhaustion. We discuss both theoretical and practical implications of promoting employees' sleep health and well-being at and outside of work.