Does working from home on a given day complicate or rather facilitate combining work and home roles that day, why and for whom? To answer these questions, we examined how a teleworking day affects daily work-to-home conflict and daily home-to-work conflict. Based on boundary theory, we expected these relationships to be mediated by daily role transitions and moderated by employees’ preferences to protect their home(/work) domain from work(/home) interruptions. Hypotheses were tested through multilevel moderated mediation modeling using diary data collected during 14 consecutive workdays with 81 employees ( N = 678 data points). In line with our expectations, employees were found to make more work-to-home transitions (i.e. interruptions of work activities to deal with home demands during work hours) on teleworking days, which was related to lower work-to-home conflict but higher home-to-work conflict on these days. They also made more home-to-work transitions (i.e. interruptions of home activities to deal with work demands after hours) on teleworking days, which was related to more work-to-home conflict on these days. The latter effect was stronger for employees with a home protection preference. There was no moderating impact of work protection preference. Overall, employees experienced less work-to-home conflict but more home-to-work conflict on teleworking days compared to non-teleworking days.

Traditionally, scientific- and practitioner-oriented publications tend to categorize employees in groups of either “good” or “bad” employees, thereby omitting that one category of employees might engage in organizational citizenship behavior (OCB-O) and counterproductive work behavior (CWB-O). In this study, we concurrently examine the mediating role of moral credits and credentials, as well as the moderating role of subjective temporal focus. Specifically, we argue that when employees enact OCB-O, they obtain moral credits and credentials, which in turn might make employees more likely to enact CWB-O. Moreover, we argue that the latter relationships depend on an employee’s subjective temporal focus, resulting in an OCB-O—CWB-O relationship that is (1) positive for a past temporal focus, (2) negative for a future temporal focus, and (3) non-significant for a present temporal focus. We examined these hypotheses by means of a multilevel weekly survey study and largely found support for our hypotheses, especially with regard to the role of moral credentials as the mediating mechanism and the aggravating versus attenuating effect of past versus future temporal focus, respectively. We end with a discussion on implications, suggestions for future research, and recommendations for practice.

A diary study on the role of psychological detachment in the spillover of self-control demands to employees' ego depletion and the crossover to their partner.

Scholars already demonstrated that psychologically detaching from work after workhours can diminish or avoid the negative effects of job demands on employees' well-being. In this study, we examined a curvilinear relationship between workload and psychological detachment. Moreover, we investigated the moderating influence of an employee's work-home segmentation preference on the relation between detachment and marital satisfaction. In addition, we applied and extended the stressor-detachment model by examining detachment as a mediator of the relation between workload and marital satisfaction. A total of 136 employees participated in our daily diary survey study during 10 consecutive working days. The results of the Bayesian 2-level path analyses revealed a negative linear and curvilinear relationship between workload and psychological detachment on a daily basis. Daily detachment positively related to marital satisfaction, with one's preference to segment work from home reinforcing this relationship. Moreover, psychological detachment fully mediated the daily relationship between workload and marital satisfaction. Implications for practice and suggestions for future research are discussed.