Commuting spillover: A systematic review and agenda for research

• Date: 01 February 2021
• Published date: 01 February 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2462
• Author: Charles Calderwood,Tanya Mitropoulos

THE JOB ANNUAL REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL

DEVELOPMENT ISSUE

Commuting spillover: A systematic review and agenda for

research

Charles Calderwood | Tanya Mitropoulos

Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech,

Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A.

Correspondence

Charles Calderwood, Virginia Polytechnic

Institute and State University, Department of

Psychology, 109 Williams Hall, 890 Drillfield

Drive, Blacksburg, VA 24061, U.S.A.

Email: ccharl2@vt.edu

Summary

Commuting is a central activity of life that cuts across industries and occupations.

Because a large majority of employees commute to work, organizational scholars

have long been interested in the relevance of commuting to organizational life. This

interest forms the foundation of a research tradition to understand commuting spill-

over, which reflects interrelationships between commuting and work experiences.

Unfortunately, commuting spillover investigations have historically been fractured

across publications in the management, psychology, transportation, and ergonomics

communities, impeding understanding of the nature and implications of commuting

spillover for organizational stakeholders. We conduct a systematic review to identify

what is known and unknown about commuting spillover, attending to both between-

and within-person approaches to studying this process. This effort yields five major

conclusions emerging from the commuting spillover literature, as well as the identifi-

cation of two frequently investigated topics that have yielded few clear findings

within this research base. This knowledge synthesis is used to develop an agenda for

the next wave of commuting spillover research that aims to extend this research base

while resolving inconsistencies observed in past research. We conclude with calls for

methodological advancement and theory development on the commuting spillover

topic.

KEYWORDS

commuting, driving, safety, spillover, strain

1|INTRODUCTION

Commuting is a common activity of daily work life that is represented

in all major industry sectors (McKenzie, Fields, Risley, & Sawyer,

2017). When factoring in the various modalities that employees can

use to get to and from work (e.g., car, walking, bike, bus), a high per-

centage of workers in the world routinely engage in commuting

(Holmes, 2017). In the United States alone, approximately 148 million

employees commute to work (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017), meaning

that 94% of the national population of employees spend time com-

muting (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). Given these frequency

rates, commuting is arguably the most prevalent activity connected to

modern work, as it is one of the few work-relevant activities that

employees across a majority of industries regularly perform.

The salience of commuting to employee life has been expanding

across the history of modern work. For example, in the United States,

commuting rarely occurred prior to the Industrial Revolution, as the

home and workplace were typically in the same location (Monroe &

Maziarz, 1985; see Rybczynski, 1985). The development of larger fac-

tory complexes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to a

minor increase in commuting distances, but even by World War II the

average distance from home to work was roughly 2 to 3 miles

(Monroe & Maziarz, 1985). The economic prosperity of the decades

following World War II combined with expanding access to

Received: 18 January 2019 Revised: 28 April 2020 Accepted: 12 May 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2462

162 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2021;42:162–187.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

automobiles to engender a major increase in suburban housing devel-

opments, such that by the late 1970s approximately one in three

workers commuted to a job outside of their immediate geographic

region (Westcott, 1979). These trends continued and accelerated dur-

ing suburban growth of the late 20th century (Lee, Seo, & Webster,

2006), with the number of possible commuters recently nearing full

capacity relative to the overall workforce (see McKenzie et al., 2017).

Many countries outside of the United States have also experienced

this historical trajectory from rural to expanding urban and suburban

development (see Keeling, 2009), suggesting that the broader move-

ment towards greater commuting prevalence and distance over time

characterizes other nations even if the historical time scale by which

these changes unfolded may differ. Because commuting is near-

ubiquitous in modern work, there has perhaps been no better time to

take stock of commuting as an organizationally relevant phenomenon.

Within the organizational sciences, the recognition that most

employees commute has generated a corresponding interest in the

associations of commuting and work variables. This interest forms the

foundation of a research tradition to understand commuting spillover,

which reflects interrelationships between commuting and work expe-

riences (Novaco, Stokols, Campbell, & Stokols, 1979). While most

commonly studied as a between-person (i.e., enduring) phenomenon

(e.g., Koslowsky & Krausz, 1993), investigators have also evaluated

within-person (i.e., daily) associations of commuting and work experi-

ences (e.g., Calderwood & Ackerman, 2019), sometimes in a time-

lagged fashion (e.g., morning commuting experiences predicting sub-

sequent at-work criteria; Zhou et al., 2017). These latter efforts have

expanded commuting spillover to encompass bidirectional processes

of commute-to-work spillover (the carryover of commuting experiences

and reactions to the workday) and work-to-commute spillover (the car-

ryover of work experiences and reactions to the commute). Commut-

ing spillover has been supported as a practically significant

phenomenon, with potential implications for employee strain (Novaco

et al., 1979), satisfaction (Amponsah-Tawiah, Annor, & Arthur, 2016),

performance (Page & Nilsson, 2017), and safety (Elfering, Grebner, &

Haller, 2012). Furthermore, commuting spillover has been observed in

numerous commuting modalities (e.g., automobile, rail, walking;

Calderwood & Ackerman, 2019; Pereira, Bucher, & Elfering, 2016;

Zhou et al., 2017), implying that commuting spillover can occur across

the spectrum of methods that employees use to commute. Moreover,

the existence of commuting spillover has been demonstrated at

numerous levels of analysis, as this spillover has been shown to be

sensitive to within-day experiences (e.g., Zhou et al., 2017) and to

vary over time (e.g., Calderwood & Ackerman, 2019), but also has

been documented in relation to enduring personal and work factors

(e.g., Elfering et al., 2012).

Unfortunately, empirical studies of commuting spillover are frac-

tured across numerous disciplines (e.g., management, psychology,

transportation, ergonomics), impeding understanding of the nature

and implications of commuting spillover. Our goals in this review are

to integrate knowledge across disciplines to identify what is known

and unknown about commuting spillover and to use this knowledge

to develop an agenda for future commuting spillover research. To

accomplish these goals, we apply the template of a systematic review

(Cooper, Hedges, & Valentine, 2009) to the commuting spillover liter-

ature to collect and synthesize knowledge regarding the relationships

of commuting and work experiences.

2|THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

Theoretical foundations of commuting spillover rest on a synthesis of

the transactional model of stress (Lazarus, 1966) and early precursors

to spillover theory (e.g., Field Theory; Lewin, 1951). As typified by

Novaco et al. (1979), this theorizing emphasizes employees' psycho-

logical appraisals of the commuting environment (e.g., traffic conges-

tion), corresponding strain reactions (e.g., physiological reactivity), and

the carryover of this strain to the work environment (e.g., anxiety at

work). Subsequent researchers have viewed the appraisal process

through the lens of Koslowsky's (1997) model of commuting stress,

which explicates stages in which objective commuting conditions

(Stage 1) filter through subjective evaluations of these conditions

(Stage 2) to influence outcomes (Stage 3), such as manifestations of

strain, that can transmit to work. In recent years, there has been an

increasing effort to position commuting spillover within more general

job strain theories that are commonly applied in organizational con-

texts, including the effort–recovery model (Meijman & Mulder, 1998),

conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989), and the job

demands–control model (Karasek, 1979). Typically, these applications

have adopted the perspective that commutes can place demands on

employees that engender the depletion of energetic or self-regulatory

resources (van Hooff, 2015; Zhou et al., 2017), with this depletion

theorized to heighten employee strain (Zijlstra & Cropley, 2006) and

impede effective job performance (Beal, Weiss, Barros, & MacDermid,

2005). Negative implications of commuting for work have also gener-

ally been argued to be lessened under conditions of greater perceived

control over commuting (Kluger, 1998). However, we caution that

direct organizational theorizing has been inconsistently applied to the

commuting spillover phenomenon, likely owing to this research area

lying at the intersection of several fields with diverse perspectives and

applications.

3|THE SCOPE OF THIS REVIEW

To narrow the scope of our review to commuting spillover applica-

tions relevant to organizations, we focus on the intersection of work

and commuting across six categories of organizationally relevant vari-

ables (demand perceptions,resource perceptions,strain,satisfaction,job

performance,safety performance). We focus on demand perceptions

(characteristics of work or the commute that require effort expendi-

ture) and resource perceptions (characteristics of work or the commute

that are relevant to achieving goals) because these factors are seen as

broadly relevant to employee health, wellness, and performance (see

Bakker & Demerouti, 2017, for a review). Our decision to include

strain (stress reactions; Cannon, 1935) extends from strain being

CALDERWOOD AND MITROPOULOS 163