The Importance of Recovery from Work in Intensified Working Life

This chapter focuses on intensified working life via the intensified job demands (IJDs) model from the perspective of recovery from work by paying particular attention to the potentially mediating and buffering roles of recovery in the linkages between IJDs and their consequences. In empirical analyses, we examined the buffering role of psychological detachment from work during off-job time in the relationship between intensified job demands and job performance and meaning of work. We found that high psychological detachment, as a recovery experience, buffered against work intensification over time in relation to job performance and meaning of work. Thus, good detachment from work during off-job time mitigated longitudinally the association between work intensification and job performance and meaning of work. However, overall the prospective buffering effects of detachment were modest in our two-wave data as were also the longitudinal direct effects of IJDs and psychological detachment on job performance and meaning of work. More research would be needed to test the suggested theoretical model more comprehensively.