Understanding employees' unused vacation days: A social cognitive approach

Despite the benefits of vacations for health and well-being, many employees do not use all of their paid vacation days. In this article, we seek to understand why this occurs. Using a social cognitive perspective, we propose that employees use fewer vacation days when they do not believe they can successfully detach from work while on vacation (i.e., have low detachment self-efficacy), do not expect positive outcomes (e.g., feeling relaxed, connecting with loved ones) from their vacations, and expect negative outcomes (e.g., feeling stressed, facing negative financial consequences) from their vacations. We test this explanation across four studies in which we develop and validate measures for our social cognitive constructs (Studies 1-3) and test whether these constructs predict employees' unused vacation days (Study 4). Results revealed that employees had more unused vacation days if they lacked detachment self-efficacy, did not expect to feel relaxed on vacation, and expected negative financial consequences of vacations. Overall, our results highlight the usefulness of social cognitive theory for understanding employees' unused vacation days. We discuss implications for theory, future research, and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).