Weekly work-school conflict, sleep quality, and fatigue: Recovery self-efficacy as a cross-level moderator

This study employed a weekly diary method among a sample of 74 Midwestern college student workers in order to examine the within-person relationships between work-school conflict, sleep quality, and fatigue over five weeks. Further, recovery self-efficacy was proposed as a cross-level moderator of the relation between sleep quality and fatigue. Results from multilevel analyses demonstrated that weekly work-school conflict was negatively related to weekly sleep quality and positively related to end-of-week fatigue, with sleep quality partially mediating the relation between work-school conflict and fatigue. These findings enhance understanding of the process by which work-school conflict contributes to college student workers' strain on a weekly basis. Additionally, student workers with low recovery self-efficacy demonstrated a negative relation between sleep quality and fatigue; however, this relation did not exist for student workers with high recovery self-efficacy. This finding suggests recovery self-efficacy as an important resource that may reduce the association between poor sleep quality (as a result of work-school conflict) and fatigue. The current findings provide important theoretical and practical implications for researchers, organizations, and college institutions as a whole.