The effectiveness of work-nonwork interventions: A theoretical synthesis and meta-analysis.

Publisher: American Psychological Association Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 0222526 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1939-1854 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 00219010 NLM ISO Abbreviation: J Appl Psychol Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: Washington Dc : American Psychological Association
Original Publication: Washington [etc.]

Employment*/psychology; Humans ; Work Engagement

A growing body of intervention studies is concerned with improving the work-nonwork interface. Extant work-nonwork interventions are diverse in terms of content and effectiveness. We map these interventions onto work-nonwork theories that explain why the interventions should improve proximal work-nonwork outcomes (i.e., conflict, enrichment, balance). Our resulting integrative framework suggests that interventions can affect work-nonwork outcomes via distinct mechanisms, which can be delineated according to their (a) content valence (i.e., increasing resources/positive characteristics or decreasing demands/negative characteristics); (b) locality (i.e., personal or contextual factors); and (c) domain (i.e., work, the nonwork, or the boundary-spanning). We further provide a meta-analytic review of the efficacy of such interventions based on 6,680 participants within 26 pre-post control group design intervention studies. The meta-analytic results reveal an overall significant main effect across all identified interventions for improving proximal work-nonwork outcomes. When comparing different kinds of interventions aimed at increasing resources, we found beneficial effects for interventions targeting personal resources over contextual resources and interventions in the nonwork domain compared to interventions in the work or boundary-spanning domain. We conclude that work-nonwork interventions effectively improve the work-nonwork interface and discuss theoretical and practical implications of the more substantial effects and potential advantages of interventions aimed at enhancing personal resources in the nonwork domain. Finally, we provide concrete recommendations for future research and elaborate on the type of studies we would like to see in terms of interventions targeting the reduction of demands, for which we found only a limited number of studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation

Date Created: 20230608 Date Completed: 20240711 Latest Revision: 20240715

20240715

10.1037/apl0001105

37289532