The trip from home to work: exploring how commuting stress impacts on tourism and hospitality employees’ work engagement

ABSTRACTExisting studies mainly discussed the various effects of family and work-related stress on tourism and hospitality employees, but the mechanism of a newly stress connecting home and work (i.e. commuting stress) on them is unknown. Drawing on affective events theory, this study aims to investigate how commuting stress impacts on tourism and hospitality employees’ work engagement. Further, the mediating role of unpleasant feelings and the moderating role of micro-break activities are also examined. A survey was completed by 379 employees in tourism and hospitality companies in China. The results showed that commuting stress was negatively related to work engagement, and unpleasant feelings played a partial mediating role. Micro-break activities significantly mitigated the relationship between unpleasant feelings and work engagement, such that the effect was weaker as micro-break activities increased. The mediating effect of unpleasant feelings was also moderated by micro-break activities. This research provides a new explanatory framework for the relationship between employee commuting stress and work engagement while also identifying a boundary condition among them. Our conclusions offer new directions for alleviating employee commuting stress.KEYWORDS: Commuting stresswork engagementunpleasant feelingsmicro-break activitiesaffective events theory Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Additional informationFundingThis research was supported by a grant from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72002050) awarded to Yushuai Chen, a grant from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72302099) awarded to Xin Liu and the grants from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 23JNQMX42) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2023M731312).