Take Action, Recover Well? The Role of Daily Proactive Recovery Strategies for Recovery, Stress, Affect, and Next-Day Performance

Abstract Although both employee wellbeing and performance are valued by organizations, achieving them conjointly is not simple in practice. Prior studies have highlighted the role of daily experiences of recovery from work stress for employee wellbeing and performance. In a work-life characterized by pressures to intensify the pace of work, employees may increasingly use proactive efforts to shape their daily off-job time to effectively recover from stress and maintain their wellbeing and performance. Based on the integrative needs model of crafting, effort-recovery model, and conservation of resources theory as guiding frameworks, we examine whether employees’ daily proactive recovery strategies predict daily off-job and work stress, affect, and subjective work performance through enhanced recovery experiences. Daily diary measurements were collected among a sample of 377 Norwegian employees across a period of two weeks in early 2022 (from Monday to Thursday, i.e., eight measurement days in total). Results of Bayesian multilevel models showed that crafting for detachment, for relaxation, and for autonomy during off-job time negatively predicted off-job stress and negative affect through matching recovery experiences, whereas crafting for mastery positively predicted positive affect through mastery experiences. Crafting for relaxation and for autonomy were directly negatively related to next-day work stress, but these effects were not mediated by matching recovery experiences. Crafting for autonomy positively predicted next-day self-rated work performance through control experiences. Our study contributes to the literature on recovery from work by highlighting proactive recovery strategies as important initiators of daily recovery processes.