From Work Screens to Home Scenes: Investigating the Association of Daily Email Incivility With Aggression and Withdrawal at Home Using a Daily Diary Approach

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a cultural shift in how and where employees work, increasing the prevalence of remote work and the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), such as email, to facilitate work interactions. The increased use of ICT has made the experience of email incivility more common, therefore in the present study, we integrated affective events theory with the perseverative cognition model of stress to examine the spillover effects of daily active email incivility on at-home behaviour. We further examined daily work-related affective rumination as a mechanism in the aforementioned relationship, as well as trait cognitive reappraisal as a potential moderator. Daily diary data were collected from 106 participants for 10 days, including a baseline survey, recruited via Prolific across three-waves of data collection. We found that daily active email incivility is positively associated with at-home aggressive behaviour, and that daily work-related affective rumination mediated this effect. However, results indicate no direct effect of daily active email incivility on at-home withdrawal, nor an indirect effect via daily work-related affective rumination. In addition, we found no support for our hypothesized moderating effect. The findings suggest that daily active email incivility is associated with detriments in at-home behaviour, influencing employees in their nonwork domains. Implications for research and practice are discussed.