Employee Recovery from Work: Interrupted Within-day Work Breaks and Their Associations with Employees' Recovery Experiences, Recovery States, and Task Performance

Abstract

Recovery from work stress is crucial for individuals to sustain optimal task performance and psychological well-being. This thesis aims to advance the knowledge of employee psychological recovery by investigating to what extent the interruptions of within-day work breaks support and detract from task performance and psychological recovery. Employee psychological recovery refers to the process by which employees return to pre-stress status after the termination of stressors. To date, the literature has focused on individual recovery during their within-day work breaks. However, scant recovery studies have considered the interrupted within-day work breaks and the associated impact on employee psychological recovery and task performance. This thesis attempts to fill this gap by examining the impact of within-day work break interruption on recovery experiences, recovery states, and task performance, along with considering the interactive effect with anticipated and preferred within-day work break duration and frequency. The empirical study involved 80 frontline service employees in a multi-branch Chinese beauty salon to complete a 14 consecutive days diary survey. The results indicated that relaxation mediated the relationship between within-day work break interruption with the state of being recovered and task performance. Moreover, expected within-day work break duration and frequency moderate and strengthen the negative direct relationship between within-day work break interruption and the state of being recovered. According to the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, these findings extend our understanding of anticipated and interrupted resource replenishment on resource loss and depletion.