Sharpening the Axe Does Not Delay Cutting Firewood:Explore the Influence of Physical Exercise on Employee Performance
Building on the national strategy of"talent-driven development",it has become the key of an enterprise's core com-petencies whether the enterprise can effectively motivate its employees to be devoted into the innovation and creativity.Since employees have been having an increasing living standard,traditional material incentives are gradually giving way to the novel internal incentives such as"leisure incentives".Although research literature in the recovery field has demonstrated positive ef-fects of physical exercise on employee wellbeing,it remains uncertain if such recovery effects can extend to job outcomes.Therefore,this study focuses on physical exercise as typical recovery activities,and examines its recovery effects on employ-ees'job performance,while also delving into the mediating pathways and boundary conditions.Drawing from conservation of resources theory,this study investigates the mediating roles of two types of recovery exper-ience,i.e.,relaxation and mastery,between employees'physical exercise at weekends and job performance in the following weeks.Additionally,we examine the moderating effect of social support at work,i.e.,leader support and coworker support,on weekend physical exercise,recovery experience and job performance and its moderated mediating mechanism.Questionnaire survey data were collected from 408 employees across 8 high-tech manufacturing enterprises over a span of four weeks by us-ing experience sampling methodology.Data analyses were carried out using Stata 16.0 and Mplus 8.0,adopting multi-level lin-ear analysis and multi-level structural equation modeling to test for mediating and cross-level moderated effects.The findings indicate that at the within-person level,physical exercise at weekends positively affects employees'job per-formance in the following weeks via enhancing their mastery experience.Social support at the between-person level moderates the positive influence of mastery on job performance.When employees receive higher levels of support from leaders and coworkers,the positive spillover effects of mastery on job performance will be weakened.Social support at the between-per-son level also moderates the indirect effect of physical exercise at weekends on job performance in the following weeks through mastery experience.The more support employees receive from leaders and coworkers at work,the weaker the indirect effect becomes.Research results confirm physical exercise to be an effective recovery activity.It exerts a"sharpening the axe does not delay the cutting firewood"positive effect on enhancing employees'job performance.This research has opened the"black box"between weekend recovery and performance results,and promoted domestic research on work recovery.At the same time,it also provides references for enterprises to explore diverse incentives in order to maintain and enhance work passion of high-quality talents.
work recoveryphysical exercisemastery experienceorganizational incentiveexperience sampling methodology
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