Too anxious to help? Off‐job affective rumination as a linking mechanism between work anxiety and helping

Abstract

This study explores the inter‐relationships of work anxiety, affective rumination, and helping behaviours. Drawing on the effort–recovery model and resource depletion perspectives to extra‐role behaviours, we hypothesized that employees with higher work anxiety would affectively ruminate about work during off‐job time, which in turn would diminish their helping behaviours at work. Results of a multisource, time‐lagged study with 167 full‐time employee‐co‐worker dyads supported this indirect effect model. The results of this study extend research on work anxiety to encompass extra‐role behaviours and indicate the value of exploring leisure time experiences as linking mechanisms in the work anxiety–job performance relationship. Practitioner points We identify affective rumination during off‐job time as a mechanism linking work anxiety to employee helping behaviours. Our findings suggest that efforts to reduce work anxiety and encourage effective employee recovery may yield more helping behaviours at work.

Cite this work

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

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.

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