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Home  >  All Issues  >  2020  >  No.06  >  Article Details
Recuperate and Build up Energy: A Literature Review and Prospects of Micro-break in the Workplace
Nie Qi1, Zhang Jie1   , Peng Jian2, Bi Yanzhao1
Full Article  |  PDF Article(953.9 KB)
Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 42, Issue 06, pp. 69 - 85 (2020)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20200410.301
First published at:Jun 01, 2020
Summary
References
Summary

In nowadays’ competitive environment, employees are facing much severe job demands and need to spend more time in dealing with work-related issues, which may evoke employees’ fatigue. In order to cope with the fatigue in the workplace, it is of particular importance for employees to take a micro-break in the workplace. If employees lack certain breaks in the workplace, they may loss large numbers of resources and cannot get recovery, which ultimately decreases employees’ job performance. As such, the concept of micro-break has attracted much attention from both scholars and practitioners in recent years.

Micro-break is a kind of short-lived, non-work-related, and informal break in the workplace. To data, researchers have investigated micro-break from two main perspectives (time-oriented and content-oriented) and developed corresponding measures. The time-oriented research focuses on duration, frequency and time point of micro-break and their implications for employees’ well-being and performance. The content-oriented research mainly focuses on how different types of micro-break affect employees’ well-being and performance.

The extant findings show that micro-break is beneficial for individuals’ physical and psychological health, work state, job performance. Specifically, the outcome variables of micro-break include physical health (physical discomfort and physical fatigue), psychological health (positive affect, negative affect, emotional exhaustion, vitality, fatigue, energy, and recovery experience), work attitude (job satisfaction, work motivate, and work engagement), and job performance (task performance and productivity).Some studies have suggested that the effects of micro-break are determined by some boundary conditions such as individual factors (mindfulness and general/stable job engagement) and work characteristics (task complexity).

Conservation of resource theory, effort recovery model and ego-depletion theory are important theories that could explain why micro-break leads to beneficial outcomes. Compared with the conservation of resource theory and the effort recovery model, the ego-depletion theory is more powerful in explaining the short-lived benefits of micro-break. In particular, the resources in the ego-depletion theory usually refer to individuals’ self-regulating resources, while the resources defined in the conservation of resource theory and the effort recovery model are too broad to capture the precise of the function of micro-break. For this reason, scholars recommend the ego-depletion theory as an important theory to explain the recovery implication of micro-break during the workday.

This paper suggests that future research can explore the issue of micro-break in the following aspects. First, based on the perspective of “right time-right place-right person”, future studies could examine the antecedents of micro-break, i.e., time characteristics (time pressure), organizational characteristics (healthy organization), and leadership characteristics (empowering leadership). Further, future studies also could explore the interactive effect of time pressure, healthy organization, and empowering leadership. Second, future studies could explore the cognitive mechanism linking micro-break to employees’ work outcomes. For example, attention may act as a mediator in the relationship between micro-break and work outcomes. Finally, we encourage future studies to explore the moderating role of cultural factors (i.e., long-term orientation) in the relationship between micro-break and work outcomes.

Keywords
micro-break; energy management; recovery; fatigue
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Cite this article
Nie Qi, Zhang Jie, Peng Jian, et al. Recuperate and Build up Energy: A Literature Review and Prospects of Micro-break in the Workplace[J]. Foreign Economics & Management, 2020, 42(6): 69-85. 
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