In their recently published article in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychologyopens in new window, a team of psychologists followed the numerous calls to take a closer look at the (systematic) variation of job demands (i.e., time pressure) over the course of a working week. Even though diary studies have become quite common in recent years, their focus has typically been on within-person effects, neglecting potential systematic variation of stressors over time. Previous diary studies have revealed that time pressure fluctuates on a daily basis, and on days with higher time pressure, employees report more fatigue, less contentment, and a greater need for recovery at the end of the workday. However, less is known about how different trajectories of time pressure over a working week might affect employees’ well-being at the end of the week or on the weekend. The team proposed that the changing levels of time pressure form quantitatively and qualitatively distinct trajectories over time and suggested that these have differential effects on well-being outcomes at the end of the working week and on the following Monday.
In a daily diary study that gathered data from 254 employees over one working week, the team applied a latent class growth analysis to identify classes of time pressure trajectories over five consecutive working days. This approach assigns individual experiences of time pressure within one working week to distinct trajectory classes. Employees who experienced similar changes in time pressure over time were clustered in four distinct classes. To describe how distinct time pressure trajectories relate to well-being indicators—specifically, positive valence, calmness, energetic arousal, and sleep quality—at the end of the working week and on the following Monday, the team applied a manual stepwise Bolck–Croon–Hagenaars approach, which estimates class-specific means of the outcomes and tests whether the classes identified differ significantly from each other on the well-being indicators.
The team identified four time pressure trajectories that differed in level and pattern: a low stable time pressure trajectory and three trajectories with changing time pressure levels (high unstable, medium unstable, and increasing unstable). The trajectories differed in their relationships to the well-being indicators. Experiencing low stable and, surprisingly, increasing unstable time pressure (i.e., a lagged marked increase followed by a decrease at the end of the working week) benefited employees, both when ending a working week and when starting the next working week. In comparison, high unstable and medium unstable time pressure trajectories were not favorable for employees’ well-being.
In this study, the team disentangled the differential effects of time pressure trajectories in terms of well-being relevance and resource depletion. Researchers should continue to explore the temporal dynamics of work characteristics to refine the understanding of resource losses and gains and their relation to employee well-being. Moreover, the team advises managers and organizations to create work environments that enable employees to schedule their job demands according to their own personal needs, specifically by scheduling increases and decreases in demand so that employees experience the lowest loss of resources and, thus, the highest level of well-being. Practically speaking and with regard to employees’ well-being, time pressure should be distributed on a lower level that either remains stable or increases during the working week, as long as the time pressure decreases again toward the end of the week.
This article is in the Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Management topic area. View more articles in the Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Management topic area.