Healthy and successful: Health‐behavior goal striving in daily work life

Abstract

AbstractHealth behaviors (physical activity and healthy eating) can be an essential part of everyday work life and are relevant for employees' affective states. Many worksite interventions, including goal‐striving approaches, have been developed to promote health behavior at work. However, these approaches often neglect that making progress with respect to health‐behavior goals necessarily takes place during workday episodes, so that work tasks are accomplished simultaneously. In our study, we aim to advance the understanding of how health‐behavior goal progress is facilitated and how reflecting on it evokes affective states—taking into account simultaneous pursuit of work‐task progress. We collected daily diary data from 205 employees on 1399 days. Analyses showed that goal importance positively predicted health‐behavior goal progress, which in turn positively predicted pride and negatively predicted shame at the end of the workday. The negative relation between health‐behavior goal progress and shame was stronger on days with low work‐task progress, implying compensatory effects. Work‐task progress did not moderate the relation between health‐behavior goal progress and pride. We discuss the theoretical and practical relevance of integrating research on multiple goal striving when promoting health behavior in daily work life by means of goal‐striving techniques.