Work and Non-Work Activities in Replenishing Workday Energy: Meetings, Individual Work, and Micro Breaks

Abstract

With heightened demands in today’s workplaces, it has become increasingly challenging for knowledge workers to replenish their energy during the workday to sustain work performance and personal well-being. Prior research suggests that taking small breaks at work, which involves short engagement in non-work activities, is useful for recovering workday energy. However, engagement in small breaks can be constrained at work, including by the time demands of work activities such as meetings. It is thus important to explore possibilities for energy replenishment in work activities themselves, especially in those that might constrain breaks in the first place (e.g., meetings). In this dissertation, I develop and examine a conceptual framework for workday energy replenishment that incorporates both the non-work activity of micro breaks and the work activities of individual tasks and meeting events. I argue that, although micro breaks can benefit workday energy, engagement in micro breaks will be suppressed on workdays when there are greater time demands from meetings (and hence less time available for individual work). More importantly, however, I draw upon two parallel theoretical perspectives of human energy and propose that (1) when a meeting event provides fulfillment of psychological needs beyond that provided in individual work, and (2) when a meeting event provides temporary relief of performance pressure among high-pressure individual work, these experiences themselves will enhance workday energy, thus serving as compensatory pathways for replenishment when micro breaks are constrained. I conducted three studies with knowledge workers using complementary designs, including two experience sampling studies and a multi-source survey study. The study results largely support the hypotheses. I conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications of this research.