Coping with daily boredom: Exploring the relationships of job boredom, counterproductive work behavior, organizational citizenship behavior, and cognitive reappraisal

Given that job boredom is experienced by more than half of the workforce on a daily basis, more scientific research on its potential outcomes and moderators is warranted. This study examined whether daily fluctuations in job boredom are associated with daily increases or decreases in counterproductive work behavior and organizational citizenship behavior, and whether individual differences in cognitive reappraisal moderated these relationships. Our hypotheses were tested in a daily diary study (396 daily observations); results indicated that the predicted positive relationships of job boredom with both active and passive counterproductive work behavior were supported, whereas the direction of the relationship between job boredom and organizational citizenship behavior was person-specific. Contrary to our expectations, cognitive reappraisal did not moderate any of the above relationships. Our results clearly show that scores on these constructs vary more within than between individuals and suggest that combining the within- and between-person levels, both in theorizing and analyses, is necessary to understand these phenomena better.