Beyond depletion: Daily self‐control motivation as an explanation of self‐control failure at work

• Author: Sabine Sonnentag,Anne Casper,Wilken Wehrt
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2484

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Beyond depletion: Daily self-control motivation as an

explanation of self-control failure at work

Wilken Wehrt | Anne Casper | Sabine Sonnentag

Department of Psychology, School of Social

Science, University of Mannheim, Mannheim,

Germany

Correspondence

Wilken Wehrt, Department of Psychology,

School of Social Science, University of

Mannheim, A5, 6 C101, D-68131 Mannheim,

Germany.

Email: wilken.wehrt@uni-mannheim.de

Summary

The organizational self-control literature usually applies resource perspectives that

explain self-control failure at work by depletion of self-control resources. However,

these perspectives neglect the role of self-control motivation. On a daily level, we

examine several self-control aspects (resources, motivation, demands, and effort) as

predictors of a manifestation of self-control failure at work, namely, daily counterpro-

ductive work behavior toward the organization (CWB-O). Additionally, we investigate

self-control effort as a mechanism predicting the depletion of self-control resources

throughout the day. We analyzed data from 155 employees in a 2-week diary study

with 2 daily measurement points. Multilevel path modeling showed that self-control

motivation and self-control demands, but not self-control resource depletion,

predicted self-control effort. There was an indirect effect from self-control motiva-

tion on CWB-O via self-control effort but no indirect effect from self-control

demands on self-control resource depletion throughout the day via self-control

effort. Findings suggest that self-control motivation is a crucial factor explaining

self-control failure at work and cast further doubt on the idea that exerted

self-control effort is the only mechanism leading to self-control resource depletion.

KEYWORDS

CWB-O, diary study, ego depletion, self-control, self-control demands

1|INTRODUCTION

Individuals usually have the goal to perform well at work (Howard,

Gagné, Morin, & Van den Broeck, 2016). Accordingly, self-control on

the job often aligns with the notion to work carefully and diligently on

relevant tasks (Dahm, Glomb, Manchester, & Leroy, 2015; Deng, Wu,

Leung, & Guan, 2016). Therefore, controlling oneself at work is crucial

because it allows to work efficiently on tasks requiring concentration

and persistence (Dahm et al., 2015; Deng et al., 2016). When

self-control fails, its importance becomes obvious: For instance, a

business partner refuses a planned project because of a carelessly

prepared draft; a deadline crucial for getting funding renewal cannot

be met because of an unfinished proposal.

To date, organizational researchers usually adopted a resource

depletion perspective on self-control at work (Lian, Yam, Ferris, &

Brown, 2017). This perspective explains self-control failure by the

depletion of a limited self-control resource. The basic notion of this

perspective is that exerting self-control requires self-control

resources, and when these resources are depleted, self-control failure

is the likely consequence (Johnson, Muraven, Donaldson, & Lin, 2017;

Muraven & Baumeister, 2000). Despite its high face validity, resource

depletion perspectives tend to disregard the role motivation may play

Received: 18 March 2019 Revised: 9 September 2020 Accepted: 27 September 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2484

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reprodu ction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Organizational Behavior published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

J Organ Behav. 2020;41:931–947. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 931

for self-control failure at work (Lian et al., 2017). Traditional explana-

tions of self-control failure solely refer to the depletion of self-control

resources, whereas it is quite conceivable that self-control failure

could be partly due to a lack of motivation to control oneself. When

self-control motivation is lacking, individuals may exert less self-

control effort. For instance, working on merely irrelevant tasks may

be simply caused by a lack of motivation to work on relevant ones—

instead of self-control resource depletion causing an inability to priori-

tize tasks correctly. Accordingly, lowered self-control motivation may

decrease self-control effort and thus explain self-control failure

(Inzlicht & Schmeichel, 2012; Molden, Hui, & Scholer, 2016).

Besides self-control motivation and self-control resource deple-

tion, also external circumstances of the work situation may explain

why individuals exert self-control at work. Such self-control demands

(Neubach & Schmidt, 2006), for instance, in the form of distracting

office environments, may urge individuals to put effort into controlling

themselves at work.

Because controlling oneself at work requires focus and persever-

ance (Dahm et al., 2015; Deng et al., 2016), self-control failure in this

realm is well reflected in behaviors such as overextending breaks,

withholding effort, or keeping oneself busy with irrelevant tasks. Daily

counterproductive work behavior toward the organization (CWB-O)

adequately encompasses these behaviors (Dalal, Lam, Weiss, Welch, &

Hulin, 2009). Thus, in this study, we view daily CWB-O as a manifesta-

tion of self-control failure at work. Thereby, we apply a broad perspec-

tive of self-control failure at work by explicitly considering daily

motivation for self-control as an indirect predictor of daily CWB-O

that exerts its influence via decreased self-control effort. In addition,

we consider the potential impact of daily self-control demands and

self-control resource depletion at the beginning of work.

In line with the propositions of Lian et al. (2017), we build on inte-

grative self-control theory (ISCT; Kotabe & Hofmann, 2015) to inves-

tigate daily self-control failure at work. The ISCT framework explicitly

considers self-control motivation, but also self-control capacity, when

investigating self-control failure. In our study, we assess daily self-

control motivation and consider self-control resource depletion as a

proxy for state self-control capacity. Furthermore, the ISCT

framework distinguishes between a person's internal processes

(i.e., motivational and capacity-related processes) and external influ-

ences (i.e., external constraints to exert self-control). Accordingly, we

strive to capture these internal processes, as well as external influ-

ences, to predict daily CWB-O at work through self-control effort on

a day level. To be more precise, we assess self-control motivation and

self-control resource depletion to understand daily motivational and

capacity-related internal processes, as well as self-control demands, to

examine external constraints requiring the exertion of self-control at

work (Schmidt & Diestel, 2015).

We contribute to the literature in several ways. First, we go

beyond resource depletion approaches by explicitly considering self-

control motivation as an alternative antecedent explaining variance in

daily CWB-O above and beyond self-control resource depletion.

Some organizational scholars already applied motivational explana-

tions of self-control but did so rather implicitly or without considering

self-control resource depletion as well (Lian, Brown, et al., 2014; Lian,

Ferris, Morrison, & Brown, 2014). We explicitly assess self-control

motivation on a daily within-person level in addition to self-control

resource depletion. By modeling both self-control resource depletion

and self-control motivation at the beginning of work, as indirect pre-

dictors of daily self-control failures at work (CWB-O), our study simul-

taneously acknowledges the potential role of resource depletion as an

antecedent of self-control failure but also considers self-control moti-

vation as an additional and alternative antecedent of self-control fail-

ure. Accordingly, our design has the advantage of attributing self-

control failure to (one of) these potential causes while statistically

controlling for the other. If motivation for self-control can explain why

self-control failure occurs above and beyond the predictive power of

depletion, this would indicate that researchers investigating self-

control at work have to move toward incorporating motivational

explanations of self-control at work (Lian et al., 2017).

Second, organizational scholars usually assume that external or

social self-control demands elicit self-control effort, driving self-

control resource depletion (Fehr, Yam, He, Chiang, & Wei, 2017;

Gombert, Rivkin, & Schmidt, 2018; Lee, Kim, Bhave, & Duffy, 2016;

Prem, Kubicek, Diestel, & Korunka, 2016). However, is it unclear if

self-control effort is the relevant mechanism leading to the depletion

of self-control resources. Interestingly, some studies predict depletion

by rather motivational variables (e.g., value incongruence and affective

commitment), indicating that self-control resource depletion can

be elicited without self-control actually being expended (Deng

et al., 2016; Rivkin, Diestel, & Schmidt, 2018). Accordingly, alternative

accounts (Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable, & Myers, 2013; Molden

et al., 2016) suggest that depletion may be a motivational state. Alike,

van der Linden et al. (2003) argued that mentally fatigued persons are

more resistant to exert further effort. Thus, feeling depleted may be

related to perceiving self-control effort as costly (Kurzban et al., 2013;

Molden et al., 2016). Accordingly, when self-control demands are

high, employees may feel depleted because they perceive self-control

effort as burdensome—even though they are not expending any self-

control effort. To summarize, it is unclear if exerting self-control effort

is the mechanism driving self-control resource depletion. Conse-

quently, we assess daily self-control demands at the end of work, daily

self-control effort at the end of work, and self-control resource deple-

tion at the beginning and the end of the workday. This allows examin-

ing whether daily self-control resource depletion processes are driven

by self-control effort elicited by self-control demands.

Third, our study adds a perspective on daily CWB-O reflecting

performance-related behaviors to the organizational literature on self-

control. These behaviors are less visible for others and may go

unnoticedon a daily basis but may havea large harmfulimpact on orga-

nizational performance (Berry, Carpenter, & Barratt, 2012). To date,

researchershave investigatedself-control failurewithin organizationsby

looking at several interpersonal behaviors, such as abusive leadership

(Lin, Ma, & Johnson, 2016), social undermining (Lee et al., 2016), or

interpersonal injustice behaviors (Johnson, Lanaj, & Barnes, 201 4). The

obvious harm of self-control failure in the social realm is undisputed.

However,the salience of interpersonally harmfulbehaviors may conceal

932 WEHRT ET AL.