Lunch Breaks Unpacked: The Role of Autonomy as a Moderator of Recovery during Lunch

John P. Trougakos · Ivona Hideg · Bonnie Hayden Cheng · Daniel Judson Beal

338 citations0/0 files storedAcademy of Management Journal

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior Workplace Health and Well-being Workaholism, burnout, and well-being

Abstract

Work recovery research has focused mainly on how after-work break activities help employees replenish their resources and reduce fatigue. Given that employees spend a considerable amount of time at work, understanding how they can replenish their resources during the workday is critical. Drawing on ego depletion (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000) and self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985), we employed multi-source experience sampling methods to test the effects of a critical boundary condition, employee lunch break autonomy, on the relation between lunch break activities and end-of-workday fatigue. Although specific energy-relevant activities had a main effect on end-of-workday fatigue, each of these was moderated by the degree of autonomous choice associated with the break. Specifically, for activities that supported the psychological needs of relatedness and competence (i.e., social and work activities, respectively), as lunch break autonomy increased, effects switched from increasing fatigue to reducing fatigue. To the extent that lunch break activities involved relaxation, however, lunch break autonomy was only important when levels of relaxation were low. We conclude that lunch break autonomy plays a complex and pivotal role in conferring the potential energetic benefits of lunch break activities. Contributions to theory and practice are discussed.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 338 citations exist upstream.

References

2000The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior 1988Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.1988Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.1989Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress.2001Job Burnout 2002Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept 1976Motivation through the design of work: test of a theory 2013Handbook of Social Psychology

Cited by

2021Recovery from Work: Advancing the Field Toward the Future 2018The recovery paradox: Portraying the complex interplay between job stressors, lack of recovery, and poor well-being 2015Are anxious workers less productive workers? It depends on the quality of social exchange.2014Too drained to help: A resource depletion perspective on daily interpersonal citizenship behaviors.2018A dynamic phase model of psychological contract processes

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.