The association between day-to-day stress experiences, recovery, and work engagement among office workers in academia-An Ecological Momentary Assessment study

Larissa Bolliger; Ellen Baele; Elena Colman; Gillian Debra; Junoš Lukan; Mitja Luštrek; Dirk De Bacquer; Els Clays

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0281556

The association between day-to-day stress experiences, recovery, and work engagement among office workers in academia-An Ecological Momentary Assessment study

PLoS One. 2023 Feb 21;18(2):e0281556. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0281556. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Larissa Bolliger¹, Ellen Baele¹, Elena Colman¹, Gillian Debra², Junoš Lukan³, Mitja Luštrek³, Dirk De Bacquer¹, Els Clays¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
² Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
³ Department of Intelligent Systems, Jožef Stefan Institute, Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Abstract

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the associations between day-to-day work-related stress exposures (i.e., job demands and lack of job control), job strain, and next-day work engagement among office workers in academic settings. Additionally, we assessed the influence of psychological detachment and relaxation on next-day work engagement and tested for interaction effects of these recovery variables on the relationship between work-related stressors and next-day work engagement.

Methods: Office workers from two academic settings in Belgium and Slovenia were recruited. This study is based on an Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) with a 15-working day data collection period using our self-developed STRAW smartphone application. Participants were asked repeatedly about their work-related stressors, work engagement, and recovery experiences. Fixed-effect model testing using random intercepts was applied to investigate within- and between-participant levels.

Results: Our sample consisted of 55 participants and 2710 item measurements were analysed. A significant positive association was found between job control and next-day work engagement (β = 0.28, p < 0.001). Further, a significant negative association was found between job strain and next-day work engagement (β = -0.32, p = 0.05). Furthermore, relaxation was negatively associated with work engagement (β = -0.08, p = 0.03).

Conclusions: This study confirmed previous results, such as higher job control being associated with higher work engagement and higher job strain predicting lower work engagement. An interesting result was the association of higher relaxation after the working day with a lower next-day work engagement. Further research investigating fluctuations in work-related stressors, work engagement, and recovery experiences is required.

Copyright: © 2023 Bolliger et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Data Collection
Ecological Momentary Assessment
Humans
Job Satisfaction
Occupational Stress*
Surveys and Questionnaires
Work Engagement*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders, Belgium (FWO) - https://www.fwo.be/en/ - under Grant (project no. G.0318.18N). This award was received by E.C. (Els Clays) and D.D.B. (Dirk De Bacquer). This work was further supported by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) - https://www.arrs.si/en/ - under Grant (project ref. N2-0081). This award was received by M.L. (Mitja Luštrek). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.