Low-effort Activities,leisure Crafting And Work Engagement-The Mediating Role Of Recovery Experiences

One's whole life is comprised of working time and non-working time.With the increasing of labor productivity and the improvement of the labor legal system,more and more leisure time are available for employees nowadays.Thus,leisure activities engagement has larger impact on work attitude and behaviors than before.After working hard all day long,employees tend to participate in some joyful and relaxing leisure activities.However,these popular low-effort activities are regarded as being passive and shallow,thus their positive effect is underestimated.They actually can free employees from busy work,because they hardly consume personal resources and give feedback instantly.However,indulging in loweffort activities may be bad for one's well-being.Engaging in more physically or psychologically active leisure activities,which aiming at goal setting,human connection,learning and personal development,might be more helpful for employees to engage in work.What we Chinese people face now is the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people's ever-growing needs for a better life.Leisure activities become more and more various as people prefer the richer material and cultural life.On the other hand,participating in leisure activities matters to working better for employees.Thus,it's necessary to figure out the impact of leisure on work engagement.Based on the conservation of resources theory and the psychological conditions of personal engagement at work,this study considered that,low-effort activities and leisure crafting both bring employees recovery experiences,thus the physical,cognitive and emotional resources needed by role performance are supplied,which further improve employees' work engagement.Among these two leisure styles,leisure crafting,inspired by eudaimonic needs,might play a bigger role in improving work engagement than low-effort activities do.In addition,the recovery path through leisure has larger impact on work engagement when employees face tremendous career development stress.According to that,the theoretical model was established and hypotheses were put forwarded,and then the data collected from 232 employees in Chinese companies were analyzed using linear regression and bootstrap via SPSS22.0,Amos 23.0 and Mplus7.0.The results showed that:(1)Both low-effort activities and leisure crafting were positively related to employees' work engagement,and leisure crafting displayed the stronger relation.(2)Recovery experiences mediated the effects of low-effort activities and leisure crafting on work engagement.(3)Career development stressor moderated the mediated effects of low-effort activities and leisure crafting on work engagement.Specifically,recovery experiences brought by loweffort activities and leisure crafting,as career development stressor increased,would contribute to more work engagement.In summary,this study focused on the impact of different type of leisure engagement on work engagement,and emphasized the “charge” function of recovery process.It's suggested that managers should ensure employees' right to have leisure time and help them to be good at spending it in order to improve their work engagement.Finally,the limitations and directions for future research were discussed.