Abstract:

Employees are the creators of organizations’ core competencies, and whether they can actively engage in work is critical to the development of organizations. So improving employees' work engagement is of great significance for both individual and organizational development. However, as competition intensifies and the pace of work accelerates, the boundary between work and non-work becomes increasingly blurred. It’s easier to physically get off work, but harder to mentally get off work, which can easily cause physical and mental exhaustion and reduce work engagement. Therefore, it is an important way to improve work engagement by helping employees to put down work during non-working hours which can avoid physical and mental exhaustion and replenish physical and mental energy as much as possible. Psychological detachment refers to the mental state in which an individual is detached from work during non-working hours, not being disturbed by work-related problems and stopping thinking about work. Mainstream studies believe that psychological detachment has a positive effect on work engagement, but there are contradictory conclusions regarding the impact of psychological detachment on work engagement. Therefore, there is still a lack of solid scientific evidence for psychological detachment as a means to improve employee work engagement.

Based on the Job Demands-Resources Model, this study constructs a comprehensive model to investigate the effect, mechanism and boundary conditions of psychological detachment on work engagement, so as to provide an integrated explanation for previous contradictory conclusions. The theoretical contributions of this study are mainly reflected in the following aspects: First, the concept of psychological detachment behavior is introduced to emphasize the distinction between psychological detachment behavior and psychological detachment state. Psychological detachment in previous studies refers to the state of psychological detachment, but the existing measurement items are easily understood as psychological detachment behavior. Psychological detachment state can help individuals recover psychological resources, but psychological detachment behavior is an individual’s emotional and cognitive regulation behavior which needs to consume psychological resources. Therefore, this study defines the connotation of psychological detachment behavior and psychological detachment state, which is helpful to reveal the influence of the two on work engagement respectively, and can also provide a more accurate concept for subsequent research. Second, based on the job demand-resource model, an integrated multiple mediating and moderating model is constructed, which can explain the contradictory conclusions about the relationship between psychological detachment and work engagement in previous studies. This study believes that this contradictory conclusion is not only caused by the failure to distinguish psychological detachment behavior from psychological detachment state, but also that there are independent positive and negative mechanisms between psychological detachment and work engagement, and the relationship is moderated by work situations and personal characteristics. Therefore, based on the job demand-resource model, this study establishes an integrated explanatory model to deepen the understandings of the effect, mechanism and boundary conditions of psychological detachment, especially to reveal the negative mechanism of psychological detachment on work engagement. Third, it reveals the difference between psychological detachment after work and psychological detachment during work breaks. Most studies have investigated the influence of psychological detachment after work on the next day’s work engagement. In addition to using the experience sampling method to explore it, we also plan to investigate the influence of psychological detachment during work breaks on the subsequent work engagement of the same day by adopting the vignette experiment method. It can reveal the differences in the effects and mechanisms of psychological detachment during and after work breaks, and deepen the understandings of the effects and mechanisms of psychological detachment between the two periods.

The conclusion can provide managers and employees with specific suggestions on psychological detachment according to different working situations and different individual characteristics, which can help employees maintain health and vitality, improve work engagement, and provide psychological capital for efficient operation and sustainable development of organizations.

Key words: psychological detachment, work engagement, experience sampling method, vignette experiment method, job demands-resources model