Too Proactive to Switch Off: When Taking Charge Creates Work-Life Conflict and Impairs Detachment

Proactive behavior, or self-initiated and future-oriented actions aimed at changing oneself or one’s environment, is crucial for individual effectiveness at work. However, its consequences for employee well-being and other such more personal outcomes have had little attention. In this research, using a within-person perspective, we investigate how proactive behavior - more specifically, taking charge - affects psychological detachment from work. Drawing on ego depletion theory, we hypothesized that taking charge would be detrimental to psychological detachment by increasing work-life conflict. However, we theorized intrinsic motivation as a boundary condition for these effects, and argued that taking charge is detrimental to detachment only when intrinsic motivation is low. A sample of 77 managers participated in a 5-day diary study that tracked taking charge and its effects over time. Multilevel analyses showed findings consistent with our hypotheses. Specifically, daily taking charge behaviors resulted ...