Short‐term Effects of Social Exclusion at Work and Worries on Sleep

Abstract

The present study investigated short-term effects of daily social exclusion at work on various indicators of sleep quality and tested the mediating role of work-related worries using a time-based diary study with ambulatory assessments of sleep quality. Ninety full-time employees participated in a 2-week data collection. Multilevel analyses revealed that daily workplace social exclusion and work-related worries were positively related to sleep fragmentation in the following night. Daily social exclusion, however, was unrelated to sleep onset latency, sleep efficiency and self-reported sleep quality. Moreover, worries did not mediate the effect of social exclusion at work on sleep fragmentation. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Work Stressors, Perseverative Cognition and Objective Sleep Quality: A Longitudinal Study among Dutch Helicopter Emergency Medical Service (HEMS) Pilots

“…To our knowledge, there are only two previous field studies that have examined the associations between work stressors and an objective measurement of sleep quality, such as sleep actigraphy 23,33) . However, the different operationalizations of the sleep quality indicators make a comparison of the results with and between the studies a difficult task.…”

“…Sleep onset latency was, however, not measured by Dahlgren and colleagues 33) . Pereira and colleagues 23) did measure sleep onset latency in their study examining the associations between workplace social exclusion, worries and sleep. In their study, workplace social exclusion was not related to sleep onset latency, whereas it was positively related to fragmented sleep 23) .…”

“…Pereira and colleagues 23) did measure sleep onset latency in their study examining the associations between workplace social exclusion, worries and sleep. In their study, workplace social exclusion was not related to sleep onset latency, whereas it was positively related to fragmented sleep 23) . Because they used a different conceptualization of sleep fragmentation (i.e., the number of awakenings lasting five minutes or longer) than we did in the current study (i.e., the number of awake periods of at least one minute), it is hard to compare the results of both studies.…”

“…However, rumination was not a mediator in the relationship between job strain and sleep quality 22) . More recently, a longitudinal study that examined work-related worrying as a mediator in the association between social exclusion at work and an objective measure of sleep quality, that is, sleep fragmentation, did not find proof for mediation either 23) . In sum, there are only a few studies examining the associations between work stressors, perseverative cognition and sleep disturbances, most of which built upon cross-sectional designs and the results are inconclusive.…”

Psychosocial work characteristics and sleep quality: a systematic review of longitudinal and intervention research

“…It would be of value to combine self-report measures with so-called "independent, objective measurements of sleep parameters", such as actigraphy [ie, SenseWear Armband (69)] or 1-Channel EEG [ZEO-sleep manager pro (70)]. These measures are user-friendly, unobtrusive, do not rely on retrospective assessments of sleep quality, and are especially useful in field and intervention settings (69,70).…”