Abstract
With the rising number of mobile devices and the chance for employees to work from anywhere at any time, the risk for employees to find it challenging to detach themselves from work is high. Recent literature on work-life balance shows how important it is to design information technology to prevent employees from work-life conflict resulting in strain, diseases or burn out. To help employees to detach themselves from work, we aim to discover how work avoidance training can affect perceived strain and psychological detachment. We hope to assist workers in learning how to detach themselves from work in their leisure time, when work demands are high. We will conduct a laboratory experiment with two groups in a between-subject experiment. We propose that employees should be able to find relaxation in times of intense work demand, in finding proven ways of ‘switching off’ from work mode, maintaining a better work-life balance.
Recommended Citation
Röding, Kristina; Jahn, Katharina; and Niehaves, Bjoern, "Better Burning than Burning Out – A Laboratory Experiment on the Impact of Training Work Avoidance on Psychological Detachment and Perceived Strain" (2019). AMCIS 2019 Proceedings. 23.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2019/healthcare_it/healthcare_it/23
Better Burning than Burning Out – A Laboratory Experiment on the Impact of Training Work Avoidance on Psychological Detachment and Perceived Strain
With the rising number of mobile devices and the chance for employees to work from anywhere at any time, the risk for employees to find it challenging to detach themselves from work is high. Recent literature on work-life balance shows how important it is to design information technology to prevent employees from work-life conflict resulting in strain, diseases or burn out. To help employees to detach themselves from work, we aim to discover how work avoidance training can affect perceived strain and psychological detachment. We hope to assist workers in learning how to detach themselves from work in their leisure time, when work demands are high. We will conduct a laboratory experiment with two groups in a between-subject experiment. We propose that employees should be able to find relaxation in times of intense work demand, in finding proven ways of ‘switching off’ from work mode, maintaining a better work-life balance.