Have Your Cake and Eat It Too? Understanding Leisure-Work Synergizing and Its Impact on Employee Thriving

As the world of work continues to evolve, employees are increasingly seeking to do more than manage the bifurcated domains of work and home. Instead, amid greater demands at work alongside greater valuation of leisure, employees are striving to thrive at work without sacrificing their free time. To explore this tension, we adopt an agentic, blended, and future-oriented perspective of the work-nonwork interface and examine leisure-work synergizing as a unique practice for employees to find synergies between leisure and work. Drawing on foundational theorizing on workplace thriving, we theorize that strategically integrating work into leisure activities in an attempt to build work-relevant competencies can inspire (via self-assurance) and hinder (via fatigue) employee thriving at work. To test these predictions, we first conducted a series of validation studies to demonstrate the conceptual relationship among leisure-work synergizing and other work and nonwork constructs. Then, using an experience sampling design, we generally found support for the bolstering effects of leisure-work synergizing on thriving through self-assurance. Moreover, segmentation preference—a theoretical moderator related to this unique boundary blurring practice—significantly influenced the proposed relationship between leisure-work synergizing and fatigue. Taken together, our research expands our understanding of the work-nonwork interface and the utility of leisure activities for working adults, integrates work-nonwork research with positive psychology to reveal nonwork agents of thriving, and highlights a novel blended practice to help scholars and managers better understand how employees can “have their cake and eat it too.” Funding: This work was supported by Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia.