| Prosocial behaviors at workplace could benefit organization by facilitating work performance and harmonious organizational environment.It also played an important role in protecting employee’s occupational health by helping with employee socialization at workplace.Meanwhile the global technology development brings unprecedented job opportunities as well as the decreasing sleep time and occupational health.Sleep,as a result of thousands years of revolution,plays a vital role in human life.However,admittedly,sleep takes one-third of time in golden work age of work population.Therefore,the question of whether sleep is necessary or helpful to work behaviors espeacially workplace prosocial behaviors lies in front of not only every one of work population but also organizations.Prior research has focused mainly on the deleterious effects on prosocial behaivors associated with ego depletion or decreased positive emotion but ignored to mention the antecedent of both ego depletion and positive emotion which is sleep.Besides,among the study discussing the influence of sleep on work behaivors most addressed the variables related with work performance,only a few explored the relationship between sleep and interpersonal behaviors.However,in the aboved mentioned limited research,researchers only used the sleep quality as the sleep index and didn’t explore the effect of sleep quantity.Whereas previous research has used either an ego depletion perspective or positive emotion perspective to establish the relationship between sleep and work outcomes,we draw on an integrative model which adopted the strength model of self control and the broaden and built theory of positive emotion to identify the influence of sleep quantity which is another important and malleable index of sleep on the workplace prosocial behaviors.We also extended the research by examing chain mediation effect of positive emotion-ego depletion-workplace prosocial behaviors by considering the refill and replenishing function of positive emotion.In this study we conducted six studies in three parts to support our arguemnet that individuals’ sleep would be an important antecedent for their prosocial behaviors at workplace with the mediation role of ego depletion,positive emotion and the chain mediation of positive emotion-ego depletion-prosocial behaviors.The first part aimed at preliminary exploration for the relationship between sleep,ego depletion,positive emotion and workplace prosocial behaviors including a semi-structure interview to 20 employees and a dairy study of 69 employees for 5 days with 335 effective data points.The second part aimed at examime the mechanism under sleep and workplace prosocial behaviors.Study 3 conducted a quasi-experiment to investigate the predicting effect of lacking sleep on workplace prosocial behaviors and the mediating role of ego depletion and positive emotion.The study lasted 10 consecutive work days and recruited 56 full-time employees with 478 effective data points in total.Participants were asked to practice sleep deprivation by postponing their bedtime for one hour for consecutive five nights before working days in the first week and resumed the regular sleep pattern in the second week.Furthermore,study 5 tested the hypothesized mediation effect with sleep duration time as predictor in two sleep conditions respectively.Study 4 conducted a lab experiment to strengthen the proposed mediation effect of positive emotion-ego depletion-workplace prosocial behaviors.The third part aimed to consolidate the hypothesized mechanism between sleep and workplace prosocial behaviors by manipulating sleep and ego depletion or positive emotion in one study.In third part,participants were asked to postponing bedtime for 2 hours for one night before workday and received intervention activities targeting to ego depletion replenish(study 5 with 90 participants)and positive emotion increasing(study 6 with 96 participants)so as to test the effect of sleep lack on workplace prosocial behaivors under the circumstances that the ego depletion and positive emotion were replenished which means the mediators were diminished.Results showed that: 1)Sleep would influence workplace prosocial behaviors,which is mediated by ego depletion and positive emotion.Lacking sleep would lead to increased ego depletion,decreased positive emotion,and finally reduced workplace prosocial behaviors.2)Sleep duration time,as an indicator for sleep had a marginal effect on workplace prosocial behaviors.In normal sleep situation,sleep duration fluctuation would not influenced the workplace prosocial behaviors.However,when in sleep shortage situation,sleep duration time could positively predict the workplace prosocial behaviors.3)The mediation effect of ego depletion and positive emotion existed in parallel in both ordinary sleep and minor sleep deprivation situation.However,when in moderate sleep deprivation situation,the mediation effect of positive emotion would take dominant place in linking sleep and workplace prosocial behaviors.4)Positive emotion,as a mediator,could ameliorate the negative effect of sleep deprivation on workplace prosocial behaviors in two ways: positive emotion could directly increase workplace prosocial behaviors and indirectly take effect by replenishing ego depletion.However,the indirect mechanism didn’t work in moderate sleep deprivation situation.Human behaviors including workplace behaviors are highly responsive to human physiological systems,but organizational importance as well as occupational health concern of this finding has been largely unexplored.By conducting 6 studies,we illustrated why and how sleep influence the workplace prosocial behaviors and different phenomenon and mechanism depending on sleep deprivation types.The study in total provided a new perspective in discussion about the precedents of workplace prosocial behaviors.It also encouraged a stronger tie between human physiology and organizational research by inviting a full consideration of how workplace behaviors were affected by everyday sleep hygiene and habit,which called for attention from working population and organization about the importance of sufficient sleep.At last we addressed the practical implications of how to remedy the negative effect when we experienced a bad sleep last night. |
