Does work engagement physiologically deplete? Results from a daily diary study

Based on the conservation of resources theory, we argue that work engagement involves resource investment, and therefore physiologically depletes resources. On this basis, we propose that work engagement accompanies high sympathetic arousal at the within- and the between-person levels, i.e. a negative objective health effect contrary to previous findings of beneficial effects on subjective psychological outcomes. To test our hypotheses, we examined heart rate variability via ambulatory assessment of 118 public office employees across five workdays. We measured daily work engagement at the end of each workday and calculated low frequency normalised and low to high frequency ratio (indicators of sympathetic activation) for work, leisure, and sleeping times of each day. As assumed, multilevel analyses showed a positive relationship between work engagement and sympathetic activation at work, during leisure, and sleeping time at the between-person level. Our hypotheses concerning the within-person associations were not supported. Thus, elevated work engagement over one workweek is associated with higher sympathetic activation, which is discussed to be a health risk.