When daily home-to-work transitions are not all bad: a multi-study design on the role of appraisals

This study disentangles positive and negative reactions to home-to-work transitions (i.e. transitions from the home role to the work role during non-work hours; HWTs) and examines their consequences for employees’ work engagement and psychological strain. Based on boundary theory and appraisal theories, we expected that positively appraised HWTs would relate to more engagement and less strain whereas negatively appraised HWTs would contribute to less engagement and more strain. We tested our hypotheses using two daily diary datasets from different Belgian companies, one collected before the COVID-19 pandemic during 13 workdays among 81 employees (678 observations; Study 1) and one collected during the pandemic during 9 workdays among 82 employees (516 observations; Study 2). Hypotheses were tested both on the within – and the between-person level using multilevel modelling to account for daily fluctuations in the appraisals of HWTs and between-person differences. As expected, positive appraisals were related to more engagement and less strain at the between-person level in both studies. We did not find this impact on the within-person level, nor did we find any within – or between-effects of negative appraisals. Our study highlights the relevance of positive appraisals for employees’ between-level engagement and strain beyond the impact of HWTs themselves.