Our research focuses on individuals at work. Our studies aim at identifying the factors that help employees to stay healthy, enthusiastic, and productive at work. In particular, we try to shed more light on self-regulatory processes that employees use in order to deal with job stressors, to recover and unwind from daily work, and to engage in health behavior on the job. As our main data-collection approach, we use longitudinal and daily-diary studies, relying on both correlational and experimental designs.
Ongoing projects
Not detaching from work during leisure time, affect, and well-being: Testing the underlying processes
This project examines psychological detachment from work during leisure time as one specific recovery experience that helps employees to unwind and recuperate after the workday. We address both short-term processes happening at the day level and longer-term processes occurring over the course of several months. To arrive at a better understanding of the benefits and the potential downsides associated with gaining mental distance from work during leisure time, we examine rumination and talking about work as mediators and differentiate between various types of psychological detachment. We collect day-level data to predict state negative and positive affect as well as panel data to predict changes in well-being over time.
The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG); duration 2018 to 2021.
Team members: Sabine Sonnentag (PI), Monika Wiegelmann, and student assistants.
Intentional forgetting of everyday work behavior
This project is part of the DFG Priority Programme “Intentional Forgetting in Organizations” (SPP 1921) and focuses on forgetting of unwanted habits in the job context. We examine the circumstances that help employees to actually abandon habits that they regard as dysfunctional and they wish to get rid of, and if persuasive systems can support this process. In (quasi)experimental field studies we test if self-regulatory processes and the use of the persuasive system can contribute to a short-term as well as longer-term change of dysfunctional habitual behavior.
The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG); duration: 2016 to 2022.
Team members in Mannheim: Sabine Sonnentag (PI), Leon Többen, and Wilken Wehrt.
Team members in Trier: Benjamin Weyers (PI), and Nico Feld.SMARTJOB: Mobile real-time interventions in the job context
This research project is part of the research consortium on “Primary Prevention and Health Promotion” focusing on “Individual and context-based real-time interventions promoting normal eating and physical activity through mobile technology (SMARTACT)”. This consortium brings together researchers from the University of Konstanz (PIs: Prof. Dr. Britta Renner (coordinator), Prof. Dr. Friedrich Breyer, Prof. Dr. Harald Reiterer, Prof. Dr. Harald Schupp), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; PI: Prof. Dr. Alexander Woll), and the University of Mannheim (PI: Prof. Dr. Sabine Sonnentag).
The project SMARTJOB aims at developing and testing mobile interventions that target healthy eating and physical activity in the job context. It addresses individual job environments as an important context that may help or hinder healty eating and physical activity. Within SMARTJOB, we conduct intervention studies that focus on daily processes and test the possibilities of mobile approaches.
The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF); duration: 2018 to 2022.
Team members: Sabine Sonnentag (PI), Theresa Koch, Jette Völker, and student assistants.
Digital technologies at the interface between work and other life domains: Autonomy and boundary management
This project is part of the interdisciplinary consortium “Digitalization in Dialogue”. The project addresses the question how people use work-related digital technologies in other life domains (e.g., home), how they shape the boundaries between different life domains and how they use their autonomy to engage proactively with the boundaries. We will use interviews and a quantitative diary approach to collect empirical data.
The project is funded by the Baden-Wuerttemberg Ministry for Science, Research, and Art.
Duration 2019 to 2021
Team members: Sabine Sonnentag (PI) and Julia Iser