You're Not You When You're Hungry: An Examination of Episodic Hunger in the Workplace

Although hunger is a ubiquitous experience in employees’ daily lives, organizational researchers have devoted little theoretical or empirical attention to its effects in the workplace. Using a self-regulatory framework, we investigate how day-to-day hunger impacts ego depletion, and in turn relates to positive and negative affective reactions and interpersonal workplace behaviors. We propose that day-to-day hunger begins a chain of psychological, affective, and behavioral effects that occur as a serial mediation process. An experience sampling study of 122 employee-coworker dyads over ten workdays largely supports our hypotheses that hunger is related to ego depletion, and, in turn, is associated with self- and other-reports of affect and interpersonal workplace behaviors (i.e., citizenship, counterproductive, and avoidance behavior). Results also revealed a cross-level moderating effect of trait mindfulness that weakened the impact of hunger on ego depletion, providing evidence that the deleterious consequences of hunger at work can be mitigated. Implications for future theory and research on hunger in the workplace are discussed.