How do nonwork activities influence employee well-being and performance? Systematic review and empirical examination

Over the past decades, profound technological, organizational, and societal changes have largely reshaped the time employees allocate to and the way they engage in both work and nonwork activities. Although employees' daily lives unfold across a continuous sequence of work and nonwork activity episodes embedded in temporal, relational, and spatial contexts, prior research has tended to examine these activities in fragmented ways and has paid limited attention to how nonwork activities, and the contexts in which they occur, shape employee well-being and performance across the flow of the workday. This thesis addresses these concerns by developing a conceptual framework of nonwork activities and empirically examining how employees' workdays are organized across temporal, relational, and spatial contexts, how these contextual features shape episodic well-being and performance, and how such effects depend on the broader sequence of activity episodes. Across three interrelated studies, the thesis reconceptualizes nonwork activities as configurations of contextual demands and resources, maps the temporal, relational, and spatial contexts of employees' workdays, and uses work breaks as a focused case to examine how episodic effects unfold across adjacent episodes of the workday. The first study (Chapter 2) provides the conceptual foundation for the thesis through a systematic review of 214 peer-reviewed studies on employee nonwork activities. The review shows that prior research has conceptualized nonwork activities in fragmented ways, either by focusing on specific activity types, such as physical activity, commuting, volunteering, or social media use, or by grouping diverse behaviors into broader categories, such as off-job activities, recovery activities, and work breaks. Across these approaches, nonwork activities have often been treated in simplified ways that obscure their multifaceted nature and hinder theoretical integration. Chapter 2 addresses these limitations and develops a demands-resources framework that reconceptualizes nonwork activities as configurations of demands and resources embedded in concrete activity episodes. The framework proposes that these characteristics shape employee well-being and performance through impairment and motivational processes and adopts an episode-based multilevel perspective in which concrete activity episodes serve as the foundational unit, with episodic experiences aggregating into daily and weekly patterns and, over time, into more enduring between-person differences in activity routines and outcomes. It also highlights that nonwork activities are embedded in a broader demands-resources ecology that includes personal and work-related characteristics, and that the temporal, relational, and spatial contexts in which activities occur are important to understanding how they are enacted and experienced. The second study (Chapter 3) examines how full-time employees allocated their time across various types of daily activities and how those activities were situated in relational and spatial contexts using nationally representative American Time Use Survey data from 2010 to 2024. This study finds that although the time devoted to work and work-related activities remained broadly stable, time allocated to nonwork activities changed over the study period, including reduced time spent on travel and increased time spent on personal care activities. Employees' workdays became increasingly home-based and solitary, with marked declines in time spent with work-related others and at the workplace, particularly after 2019. These shifts were especially evident in work-related activities, eating and drinking, and socializing. This study further shows that relational and spatial contexts were associated with episodic well-being, and these associations varied across activity types and changed over time. For work activities, being with work-related others (versus being alone) and working in the workplace (versus at home) became less favorable over time, whereas for nonwork activities, being with others (versus being alone) was generally associated with more favorable well-being, although these benefits became more selective over time. These findings show that employee well-being depends not only on what employees do and how much time these activities take, but also on where the activities take place and with whom they are undertaken, and these context-well-being relationships have changed over time. The third study (Chapter 4) examines how contextual features of activity episodes shape well-being and performance within the flow of the workday, using work break as a focused case. Drawing on self-determination theory and the episodic perspective of the workday, this study investigates how taking breaks with others (versus alone) influences break effectiveness in terms of changes in well-being and performance across pre-break work, break, and post-break work episodes. Using a nationally representative UK Time Use Survey and an online experiment, the findings show that taking breaks with others (versus alone) was associated with greater increases in relatedness need satisfaction, which in turn predicted more favorable changes in well-being from the pre-break work episode to the break episode. Taking breaks with others (versus alone) was also associated with greater improvement in task performance from the pre-break to the post-break work episodes. Importantly, these benefits depended on the social context of adjacent work episodes. The benefits of social breaks for changes in relatedness need satisfaction and well-being during the break were stronger when the pre-break work episode had been solitary, indicating a compensatory pattern. By contrast, continuity in social context across break and post-break work episodes supported more favorable changes in well-being and performance from the pre-break to the post-break work episodes, indicating a reinforcing pattern. These findings show that break effectiveness is shaped not only by the social context of the break itself, but also by how the break is situated within the broader sequence of workday episodes. Taken together, the thesis advances an integrated and context-sensitive understanding of how nonwork activities influence employee well-being and performance across the workday. It moves beyond treating nonwork activities as simple activity labels by reconceptualizing them as contextualized episodes characterized by demands, resources, and temporal, relational, and spatial features. Across the three studies, this thesis shows that the effects of nonwork activities depend not only on what employees do, but also on whom they are undertaken with, where they occur, and how they are situated within broader workday activity sequences. These findings extend the existing research on employee well-being and performance beyond work and highlight the importance of understanding nonwork activities as integral components of employees' work lives.