The call on Sunday: Work-related communication during off-work hours and employee experiences

We utilize longitudinal data from Germany to examine how work-related communication during off-work time is associated with employees’ experiential outcomes in terms of work-to-family conflict, mental health, and job satisfaction. Our rich data allow us to estimate a long-term association net of various confounding factors using individual fixed effects regressions. We find a strong positive association between off-work communication and work-to-family conflict; however, we cannot establish statistically significant relationships with mental health or job satisfaction. Moreover, once we include a set of job and personal characteristics and control for unobserved individual time-invariant heterogeneity, the coefficient estimate for the relationship between off-work communication and work-to-family conflict, albeit still significant, substantially drops in size. We conclude that previous studies may have overestimated the relationship between off-work communication and the experiential outcome variables considered in this study.