The Effects of Daily Ritual Behaviors at Work on Daily Flow Experience and Task Performance

Abstract

Although the benefits of performing ritual behaviors have been recognized in various fields, it remains unclear whether, why, and when employees can promote their daily task performance via engaging in ritual behaviors at work. To fill these theoretical gaps, we conducted two studies to develop a new scale to measure employees’ enactment of ritual behaviors at work and test the psychological processes linking daily ritual behaviors at work and task performance and the boundary condition of this association. In Study 1, we first collected the critical incidents from 151 full-time employees to develop a new measure of ritual behaviors at work. Then we performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to examine the validity of our new measure using the second sample (total N = 646). In Study 2, we tested our theoretical model by employing the experience sampling method and collected daily data twice from 195 employees across five consecutive workdays, resulting in 912 matched daily responses. Consistent with the bottom-up and top-down processing of rituals and self-determination theory, the results indicated that daily ritual behaviors at work increase daily flow experience, enhancing subsequent task performance. Importantly, employees’ job autonomy can further amplify the positive effect of daily ritual behaviors on daily flow experience. Future researchers can use our measure to capture employees’ ritual behaviors at work and test its effects on other work-related outcomes to expand our understanding of rituals at work.