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When Do You Procrastinate? Sleep Quality And Social Lag Jointly Predict Self-Regulatory Failure At Work, Jana Kuhnel, Ronald Bledow, Nicolas Feuerhahn

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study investigates antecedents of procrastination, the tendency to delay the initiation or completion of work activities. We examine this phenomenon from a self-regulation perspective and argue that depleted self-regulatory resources are an important pathway to explain why and when employees procrastinate. The restoration of self-regulatory resources during episodes of non-work is a prerequisite for the ability to initiate action at work. As sleep offers the opportunity to replenish self-regulatory resources, employees should procrastinate more after nights with low-quality sleep and shorter sleep duration. We further propose that people's social sleep lag amplifies this relationship. Social sleep lag arises if …