Conquering Unwanted Habits at the Workplace: Day-Level Processes and Longer Term Change in Habit Strength

Although habits are a well-researched topic within psychology, habits enacted at the workplace received limited attention in the organizational literature. In this article we examine habits that employees show at the workplace. Because workplace habits are not always functional for performance or affective outcomes, and because employees themselves may regard specific habits as undesirable, it is important to identify ways of how employees can abandon such unwanted habits. We report findings from a dailysurvey study (N = 145 persons) in which we examined if self-regulatory processes predict disengagement from undesirable habits and engagement in more desirable alternative behaviors. Multilevel path analysis showed that day-specific implementation intentions and day-specific vigilant monitoring were negatively related to day-specific habitual behavior and positively related to day-specific alternative behaviors, both in the morning and in the afternoon.