Employees’ weekend activities and psychological well-being via job stress: A moderated mediation role of recovery experience

An employee’s off-work activities are known to contribute positively to recovering their energy levels depleted by daily work. Despite this view and understanding, the effect of employees’ weekend activities on their psychological well-being has not attracted sufficient research interest. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between employees’ weekend activities and their psychological well-being, and the mediating role of job stress in the above relationship. We also investigated the moderating role of the recovery experiences in the relationship between employees’ weekend activities and job stress. Furthermore, we examined the moderated mediating effect of recovery experiences on the relationship among employees’ weekend activity, job stress, and psychological well-being. The survey data was obtained from 294 employees working in 15 manufacturing companies in South Korea. The participants were 71.1% men and 28.9% women, 49.7% were university graduates, followed by 26.2% college graduates, 12.6% high school graduates, 10.2% post-graduates, and 1.4% Ph.D. holders. In terms of age composition, 50% participants were in their thirties, followed by 19.7% in their forties. The empirical analysis revealed that weekend activities are positively associated with employees’ psychological well-being. Moreover, job stress was found to mediate the relationship between weekend activities and psychological well-being. We also found that the recovery experiences positively moderated the relationship between weekend activities and job stress. Further, the study revealed that the higher the level of recovery experience, the greater the effect of weekend activities on psychological well-being affected by job stress. The paper also discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the study.