The limits of agile work: Exploring the effects of agility on sleep and innovativeness

Length, quality and consistency of sleep represent crucial factors in human energy restoration and subsequently a key predisposition to normal functioning for individuals at work, and away from it. Despite research from fields related to medicine neuroscience, psychology, health and physiology, to name just a few, sleep problems remain highly prevalent in modern society. This is particularly worrying as individuals sleep and work approximately ⅔ of our lives, and sleep has important implications for workplace performance, collaboration and general well-being. The ‘24/7-on’ society where constant connectedness to work and technology are blurring the lines between work and free time has made these issues even more highlighted. Our lives, and thus sleep patterns, are ‘now more complicated than they were’, leaving people disrupted and disorientated, with crucial effects on how individuals behave at work. Recent meta-analyses and systematic review articles on this matter are insightful, however, several crucial shortcomings related to research linking sleep and work are identified: 1) Previous reviews, both systematic and meta-analytic, were predominantly based on cross sectional studies and consequently do not allow for causal inferences. 2) The body of literature focused on the relationship between work and sleep usually focuses on only one aspect of a potentially reciprocal relationship between the two; thus only examining work as an antecedent of sleep, or vice versa, but not both simultaneously. 3) Methodologically, there is a clear dearth of research on work and sleep association that would be applying objective measures of sleep, especially in a natural sleep environment, and do so in connection with real-life work phenomena. 4) Theoretically/content-wise, while studies have addressed the relationship between sleep and workplace performance and vice versa, there is an important thematic gap in the literature related to assessing workplace performance in the context of agile, creative, innovative knowledge work. The basic objective of this project is to rigorously examine how occurrences at work affect sleep, and vice versa. Our research will tackle this objective by using objective measures for sleep (via clinically-validated devices) in a natural sleep environment, combining them with daily experience-sampling-based perceptions and participants’ experiences in a real-life work setting. We will do so over time, enabling us to capture the causality in the basic relationship between sleep and work, examine their reciprocal nature and effects over time in the setting of agile creative and innovative work. As boundary conditions of work and sleep relationship unfolding over time in this context, we will also investigate employee personal characteristics (e.g., proactivity, resilience) and job/contextual characteristics (e.g., autonomy, task interdependence, social support, skill variety, psychological safety).