You Deserve a Break Tonight: A Self-Regulatory Perspective on Psychological Detachment

Adopting a self-regulation lens, this paper explores potential behavioral antecedents that might enable or hinder employee psychological detachment in after-work hours. Daily task performance and counterproductive time use during the workday are proposed to impact daily psychological detachment, which is then proposed to predict sleep quality. Neuroticism is proposed to moderate the relationship between daily workplace behaviors and psychological detachment. Results indicate that daily performance has a positive effect on an individual’s psychological detachment that evening after work, and that this effect is moderated by neuroticism. Specifically, individuals higher in neuroticism have a harder time detaching when their performance is poor. Counterproductive time use was not found to predict detachment or interact with neuroticism. Daily psychological detachment is additionally found to have a positive effect on sleep quality. This paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and potential areas for future research.