When do you procrastinate? Sleep quality and social sleep lag jointly predict self‐regulatory failure at work

• Published date: 01 October 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2084
• Author: Ronald Bledow,Nicolas Feuerhahn,Jana Kühnel
• Date: 01 October 2016

When do you procrastinate? Sleep quality and

social sleep lag jointly predict self-regulatory

failure at work

JANA KÜHNEL

1

*, RONALD BLEDOW

2

AND NICOLAS FEUERHAHN

3

1

Department of Work and OrganizationalPsychology, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany

2

Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University, Singapore

3

Occupational Insurance Association (VBG - Ihre gesetzliche Unfallversicherung), Munich, Germany

Summary This study investigates antecedents of procrastination, the tendency to delay the initiation or completion of

work activities. We examine this phenomenon from a self-regulation perspective and argue that depleted

self-regulatory resources are an important pathway to explain why and when employees procrastinate. The

restoration of self-regulatory resources during episodes of non-work is a prerequisite for the ability to initiate

action at work. As sleep offers the opportunity to replenish self-regulatory resources, employees should

procrastinate more after nights with low-quality sleep and shorter sleep duration. We further propose that

people’ssocial sleep lag amplifies this relationship. Social sleep lag arises if individuals’preference for sleep

and wake times, known as their chronotype, is misaligned with their work schedule. Over five consecutive

workdays, 154 participants completed a diary study comprising online questionnaires. Multilevel analyses

showed that employees procrastinated less on days when they had slept better. The more employees suffered

from social sleep lag, the more they procrastinated when sleep quality was low. Day-specific sleep duration,

by contrast, was not related to procrastination. We discuss the role of sleep for procrastination in the short run

and relate our findings to research highlighting the role of sleep for well-being in the long run. Copyright ©

2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: procrastination; self-regulation; sleep; chronotype; diary study

Employees frequently experience days when they fail to do the things they had planned. Procrastination, the ten-

dency to delay the initiation or the completion of activities (Howell, Watson, Powell, & Buro, 2006; Lay, 1986), is

a prevalent and pernicious form of self-regulatory failure that can result in adverse consequences (Steel, 2007).

When employees procrastinate, they may fail to meet deadlines (Van Eerde, 2003), risk the success of projects

(Gersick, 1989), and jeopardize safety, for instance, when a worker fails to promptly run a safety check. Moreover,

procrastination is frustrating for employees because it implies a discrepancy between intentions and actions and

impedes the positive experience of making progress on work tasks (Amabile & Kramer, 2011). These adverse con-

sequences raise the question of why employees procrastinate. Research on procrastination has not yet provided a

satisfying answer to this question (Steel, 2007).

We address this question from a self-regulation perspective and focus on employees’chronic sleep patterns, as

well as day-specific sleep characteristics, as potential antecedents of procrastination (Muraven & Baumeister,

2000). According to this perspective, procrastination is due to depleted self-regulatory resources (Tice &

Baumeister, 1997). The restoration of self-regulatory resources during episodes of non-work is a prerequisite for

the ability to initiate action and to engage at work (Kazén, Kaschel, & Kuhl, 2008; Kühnel & Sonnentag, 2011).

Building on the metaphor coined by Muraven and Baumeister (2000), we assume that the ability to self-regulate re-

sembles a muscle that recovers during sleep. A person’s day-specific sleep quality and sleep duration allow for the

*Correspondence to: Jana Kühnel, Department of Work and Organizational Psychology, Ulm University, 89069 Ulm, Germany. E-mail: jana.

kuehnel@uni-ulm.de

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 27 March 2015

Revised 07 December 2015, Accepted 08 December 2015

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 37, 983–1002 (2016)

Published online 27 January 2016 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2084

Research Article

restoration of self-regulatory resources and should therefore prevent procrastinationat work (Baumeister, Muraven, &

Tice, 2000).

The extent to which self-regulatory resources can be replenished during sleep should depend on the alignment be-

tween people’s biological preferences for sleep and wake times (i.e., their chronotype; Horne & Østberg, 1977;

Roenneberg, Wirz-Justice, & Merrow, 2003) and people’s work schedule as a social requirement. When individuals’

work schedule misalign with their biological preference—in particular, when individuals have to start working while

they still need to sleep—restoration of self-regulatory resources should be impaired. An example of misalignment

between individuals’biological preferences for sleep and wake times and the work schedule can be seen when an

employee’s biologically preferred wake time is around 8 a.m. but the employee is forced to take a red-eye flight

at 6 a.m. every Monday to be at a client’s location on time. The alignment between individuals’biological prefer-

ences and their work schedule, or the lack thereof—termed social sleep lag (Wittmann, Dinich, Merrow, &

Roenneberg, 2006)—is of high societal relevance: The majority of the population experiences social sleep lag

because many employees are faced with work schedules that do not match their biologically preferred sleeping

window (Roenneberg, Allebrandt, Merrow, & Vetter, 2012; Wittmann et al., 2006).

Social sleep lag (Wittmann et al., 2006) has not yet gained attention in the field of organizational behavior in spite

of its relevance for self-regulation. We argue that social sleep lag should be taken into account because of its signif-

icance for sleep quality and sleep duration, and thus the restoration of self-regulatory resources. Social sleep lag may

help to explain why some people have more self-regulatory resources at their disposal than do others, which, in turn,

should be related to procrastination at work.

Individual differences and within-person fluctuations in procrastination

Most research on procrastination has adopted an individual differences perspective and has examined procrastination

as a broad and relatively stable behavioral tendency to delay the initiation or completion of an intended course of

action. This behavioral tendency has been linked to a variety of antecedents and consequences. With respect to an-

tecedents, meta-analytical evidence has suggested that procrastination is consistently negatively related to conscien-

tiousness and self-efficacy and positively related to distractibility and impulsiveness (Steel, 2007; Van Eerde, 2003).

Regarding consequences of procrastination, procrastinators experience higher stress, more likely miss important

deadlines, non-optimally set self-imposed deadlines, and spend less time on preparing important tasks, all of which

may result in work of inferior quality (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Tice & Baumeister, 1997; Van Eerde, 2003).

Howell et al. (2006) found a significant negative correlation between procrastination and say–do correspondence.

That is, people who report a tendency to procrastinate also display the generalized tendency not to do wh at they said

they will do.

Research on individual differences in procrastination can shed light on the attributes associated with procrastina-

tion; however, it does not directly identify the pattern of events and processes that give rise to procrastination. An

approach that is more suitable for this endeavor, but one which has rarely been used, is to study fluctuations in pro-

crastination within a person over time (for an exception that examined the completion of daily tasks, see Claessens,

Van Eerde, Rutte, & Roe, 2010). The premise of studying procrastination as a within-person phenomenon is that

individuals’ability to initiate and complete planned actions varies over time—in the present study, from workday

to workday. We argue that most people will display a certain level of procrastination on some workdays, and that

sleep plays a critical role in explaining why this occurs. By examining how sleep affects procrastination on a

day-to-day basis, a more fine-grained understanding of the phenomenon can be developed. An improved under-

standing of the events and processes leading to procrastination can, in turn, help to build predictive models of pro-

crastination and to provide practical recommendations of how to prevent and manage procrastination. As will be

elaborated later, we assume that on a daily level, employees succeed in initiating and completing action at work

when they have self-regulatory resources available. Because sleep should supply regulatory resources from day to

day, we investigate sleep characteristics as predictors of daily procrastination at work.

984 J. KÜHNEL ET AL.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 37, 983–1002 (2016)

DOI: 10.1002/job