Panacea or Mixed Blessing? Learning Goal Orientation Reduces Psychological Detachment via Problem‐Solving Rumination

Abstract

This study seeks to test whether employee learning goal orientation, due to its prompting of work goal‐related thoughts at home (problem‐solving rumination), is associated with lower detachment from work during non‐work time (and higher work creativity). For learning goal‐oriented employees, the goal to achieve work‐related improvements is chronically cognitively accessible. Moreover, highly accessible work goals could become more frequently activated at home when cues about work tasks permeate the boundaries of the home role. Accordingly, we further hypothesized that the link between learning goal orientation and problem‐solving rumination (and indirectly detachment and creativity) is stronger for individuals with weaker “role segmentation.” A time‐lagged study among 300 employees supported our predictions: learning goal orientation, via problem‐solving rumination, predicted psychological detachment (and creativity), and these direct and indirect relationships were stronger when role segmentation was weaker. The results of this study imply that those highly motivated and strongly contributing LGO employees may also be most vulnerable and may benefit from proper boundary management.

Review of the Internal Structure, Psychometric Properties, and Measurement Invariance of the Work-Related Rumination Scale – Spanish Version

“…Interestingly, of the 25 studies revised, only seven studies used the complete WRRS and those included the original study in which the WRRS was developed ( Cropley et al, 2012 ; Querstret and Cropley, 2012 ; Vandevala et al, 2017 ; Dunn and Sensky, 2018 ; Sulak Akyüz and Sulak, 2019 ; Weigelt et al, 2019a ; Mullen et al, 2020 ), 11 used the affective and problem-solving pondering subscales ( Bisht, 2017 ; Kinnunen et al, 2017 , 2019 ; Querstret et al, 2017 ; Syrek et al, 2017 ; Vahle-Hinz et al, 2017 ; Firoozabadi et al, 2018a , b ; Junker et al, 2020 ; Zhang et al, 2020 ; Pauli and Lang, 2021 ), two studies used the problem-solving pondering and Detachment subscales ( Zoupanou et al, 2013 ; Mehmood and Hamstra, 2021 ), only one used the Detachment subscale ( Svetieva et al, 2017 ), and four studies used the affective rumination subscale ( Querstret et al, 2016 ; Van Laethem et al, 2019 ; Weigelt et al, 2019b ; Cropley and Collis, 2020 ; Smyth et al, 2020 ). Thus, the use of the subscales of the WRRS vary according to the researchers need and purpose.…”

Facilitating detachment from work: A systematic review, evidence-based recommendations, and guide for future research.

“…This line of research has demonstrated that relatively stable characteristics of the person can affect detachment from work. Studies have examined a wide variety of individual characteristics including self-evaluations (e.g., Bipp et al, 2019), personality (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007), coping and emotion regulation (e.g., Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007), learning goal orientation (Mehmood & Hamstra, 2021), regulatory focus (Hauser et al, 2018), and perfectionism (Gluschkoff et al, 2017). The most studied predictors in this category were work-to-home segmentation preferences and heavy work investment .…”

Serving the cause when my organization does not: A self‐affirmation model of employees’ compensatory responses to ideological contract breach

“…We asked participants to report their experiences of rumination over breached ideology in the past few weeks by using a well-established eight-item scale (McCullough et al, 2007). Previous research has used a similar time-lag approach to measuring rumination (Calderwood et al, 2018;Deng et al, 2021;Mehmood & Hamstra, 2021). Sample items include:…”