Going beyond work and family: A longitudinal study on the role of leisure in the work–life interplay

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2098
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Author: Alexandra M. Freund,Bettina S. Wiese,Michaela Knecht
• Date: 01 October 2016

Going beyond work and family: A longitudinal

study on the role of leisure in the work–life

interplay

MICHAELA KNECHT

1,2

*, BETTINA S. WIESE

3

AND ALEXANDRA M. FREUND

1,2

*

1

Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

2

University Research Priority Program Dynamics of Healthy Aging, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

3

Department of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

Summary Going beyond the relation of work and family, the present three-wave longitudinal study spanning one year

assessed different forms of conflict and facilitation between leisure and the life domains work and family

and their relation to subjective well-being. A sample of N= 277 employed men and women reported their

perceived conflict and facilitation between leisure, work, and family and subjective well-being. Results

suggest that leisure is a source of facilitation for work and family, and, at the same time, a major recipient

of conflict from work and family. Moreover, leisure conflict was negatively correlated and leisure facilita-

tion was positively associated with concurrent subjective well-being. Both conflict and facilitation between

all three life domains remained highly stable over the course of one year. Only few and non-systematic

lagged effects were found, indicating that the variance of the stability of the constructs and their relations

over time leave little room for longitudinal predictions. Taken together, the study demonstrates that, similar

to work–family relations, conflict and facilitation with the leisure domain are also associated with subjective

well-being and remain highly stable over the course of a year in the lives of young and middle-aged adults.

© 2016 The Authors Journal of Organizational Behavior

published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: conflict; facilitation; leisure; work; family; subjective well-being

Most of the literature concerned with “work–life”conflict and facilitation focuses exclusively on the interplay of

work and family, although leisure is another key life domain for most people (Newman, Tay, & Diener, 2014).

As convincingly shown in a recent meta-analysis by Kuykendall, Tay, and Ng (2015), leisure activities do not only

take up time in our everyday lives but they also contribute to subjective well-being. However, despite the apparent

importance of leisure, this life domain has received little attention in the literature on the relations between different

life domains and their associations with subjective well-being. This is the main purpose of the current study. More

specifically, this article extends previous research on the “work–life”relation by including leisure in exploring

conflict and facilitation between different life domains and their associations with subjective well-being. The main

research question was whether young and middle-aged adults experience more conflict or more facilitation between

leisure and other life domains (work and family). Moreover, we investigated the associations of these relations with

subjective well-being using a longitudinal design with three measurement points covering the period of one year.

The longitudinal design allowed us to investigate the inter-domain relations and their associations with subjective

well-being over time.

Previous research has repeatedly shown that work-family conflict is associated with lower subjective well-being

(Amstad, Meier, Fasel, Elfering, & Semmer, 2011), whereas facilitation between work and family is associated with

higher subjective well-being (e.g., Kinnunen, Feldt, Geurts, & Pulkkinen, 2006; Wiese, Seiger, Schmid, & Freund,

*Correspondence to: Michaela Knecht or Alexandra M. Freund, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Binzmuehlestrasse 14/11,

CH-8050 Zurich, Switzerland. E-mail: m.knecht@psychol ogie.uzh.ch(Michaela Knecht); freund@psychologie.uzh.ch(Alexandra M. Freund)

m.knecht@psychologie.uzh.ch

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

reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2016 The Authors Journal of Organizational Behavior

published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 13 January 2015

Revised 25 January 2016, Accepted 29 January 2016

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 37, 1061–1077 (2016)

Published online 4 March 2016 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2098

Research Article

2010). Much less is known about the role of leisure for managing the multiple demands of the everyday lives of

middle-aged adults. Does leisure help to “unwind”after a stressful day at work and when faced with family-related

chores and obligations? Or does it add to the burden of having to manage multiple life domains in the face of limited

resources such as time and energy? The present study addresses this question. To gain insight into various forms and

directions of the relations between work, family, and leisure, we differentiate between different facets and

dimensions of inter-domain conflict and facilitation.

The literature on “work–life”balance is dominated by cross-sectional studies (Nohe, Meier, Sonntag, & Michel,

2015), and only little is known about the temporal stability of inter-domain relations and their associations with

subjective well-being over time and their temporal ordering. Questions related to such time-lagged relations are,

for instance, if lower subjective well-being leads to higher perceptions of conflict, if higher conflict leads to lower

subjective well-being, or both. The current three-wave longitudinal study allows testing for such lagged effects.

The role of leisure

Voss (1967, p. 101) defines leisure as “a period of time referred to as discretionary time …when an individual feels

no sense of economic, legal, moral, or social compulsion or obligation.”We largely agree with this definition but

maintain that commitment to leisure activities (such as singing in a choir or being a member of a sports team) also

comes with a certain degree of obligation that might lead to conflict with other life domains. Therefore, following the

subjective approach to defining leisure, we take a less restrictive definition of leisure than Voss and leave it up to the

person to define what they consider as leisure (Newman et al., 2014).

Although the importance of leisure for recreation and recovery from taxing work-related demands has been

recognized (e.g., Fritz & Sonnentag, 2005), there is a dearth of research that considers the potentially conflicting

or facilitating relations of leisure with work and family. The DRAMMA model proposed by Newman et al.

(2014) proposes five psychological mechanisms of how leisure might influence subjective well-being, namely,

through experiencing detachment from work (leading to recovery), autonomy, mastery, meaning, and affiliation.

Whereas four of these five mechanisms describe experiences associated with engaging in specific leisure activities

(e.g., feelings of mastery when playing golf), detachment-recovery inherently involves the relation to other life do-

mains. Detachment-recovery denotes the process that engaging in leisure activities helps to detach from work-related

(or other kinds of) stress and preoccupations and, thereby, contributes to recharging overtaxed resources or, in other

words, to recovery. Note that detachment is not restricted to take place only to recover from work and family, but it

might also be good at times to detach from certain leisure activities (e.g., when feeling overwhelmed from and

preoccupied with planning a vacation in an exotic country). For such taxing and exhausting leisure activities, work

or family might actually help to detach and recover from them.

According to the DRAMMA model, leisure seems to be primarily a life domain that facilitates functioning in the

life domains of work and family. However, engaging in leisure activities also takes time, often requires energy, and

sometimes also money, which might conflict with pursuing goals in the work or family domain. This might also add

to the many demands that juggling work and family already pose in the everyday lives of young and middle-aged

adults. In short, then, we maintain that including leisure in the study of “work–life”balance provides a more

comprehensive picture of the inter-domain relations than considering only work and family.

Conflict between life domains

The ample literature on the interplay of work and family has convincingly shown that these two life domains place

high demands on young and middle-aged adults who are in a life phase that requires the investment of time and

energy in furthering one’s career as well as in spending time with one’s partner and children (for an overview,

see Eby, Caspar, Lockwood, Bordeaux, & Brinley, 2005; Wiese & Freund, 2000). Engagement in leisure activities

1062 M. KNECHT ET AL.

© 2016 The Authors Journal of Organizational Behavior

published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

J. Organiz. Behav. 37, 1061–1077 (2016)

DOI: 10.1002/job