Integrating a Concern for Health with Playful Design: A Daily Diary Study Using the APIM Model

How do proactive behaviors of employees at work affect their health-related behaviors and that of their partners at home? Integrating conservation of resources, spillover theory and crossover theory, we test a couple-dyadic model to examine the impact of playful work design on the focal person’s and his/her partner’s health-related outcomes. We collected daily survey data from 65 dual-earner couples over a period of 15 working days. Drawing on the multilevel Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM), our results reveal that playful work design is positively related to healthy eating motives and self-care through playful leisure design, for both male and female partners. Moreover, the positive relationship between the playful leisure design and the healthy eating motives is moderated by the individual’s motivation for healthiness. Our results also show that there is a gender difference in the crossover effects from playful leisure design to health-related outcomes such that the crossover effects are only significant from the female partner to the male partner. The study contributes to the literature by examining the associations between proactive behaviors at work and health-related outcomes in the couple-dyadic setting. It also extends the couple-dyadic model discussion to the leisure domain.