Active Recovery Is Not Just for Athletes: Employees Need to Train for Recovery to Enhance Work

Trials of recovery training report mean gains in psychological detachment, but the mean does not show whether training helped the employees who detached least or those who already detached well. An aptitude-treatment account predicts larger gains at the low end of the baseline distribution (compensation), and a cumulative-advantage account predicts larger gains at the high end (accumulation). I tested the two accounts in a prespecified reanalysis of a randomized trial among German employees (N = 393, 76% women, mean age 41; 247 with posttest data) that compared a wait-list control with a 6-week cognitive-behavioral recovery training and a 6-week mindfulness-based training. The primary test was the baseline × condition interaction in a Lin-adjusted regression of posttest detachment; secondary analyses were quantile treatment effects, changes-in-changes and Lee bounds, multiple imputation, and a missingness model. Both trainings raised detachment at the mean baseline by about 0.9 points, and quantile effects were larger at the .25 than at the .75 quantile in both groups. The cognitive-behavioral interaction was −0.21 (95% CI [−0.50, 0.08]), leaning toward compensation, and the mindfulness interaction 0.04 (95% CI [−0.24, 0.33]); the condition contrast was 0.25 (95% CI [−0.01, 0.51]), and all three intervals included zero. Dropout before the posttest was not detectably patterned by baseline detachment in any group. The results support neither compensation nor accumulation. Neither training detectably favored employees at either end of the baseline distribution, and the intervals bound how large either pattern could be in a trial of this size.