Dynamic Digital Detachment and Work-Family Permeability: The Interactive Regulatory Path of Personality and Cognitive...

Mobile connectivity has worn the work-home boundary thin for employees born after 1995, prompting some to deliberately disconnect from work-related digital channels during nonwork time. Whether this digital detachment reliably narrows work-family permeability, and for whom, has been obscured by static cross-sectional designs that treat permeability as fixed rather than as a process unfolding across days.

Using a two-week experience-sampling study of 192 digitally native Chinese employees aged 22-29 (53.6% women), yielding 2304 day-level observations, we modeled the trajectory of permeability with multilevel growth and cross-lagged panel specifications.

On days when employees disconnected more than their own average, permeability was lower both the same evening (within-person coefficient about -0.31) and one day later (about -0.24), and this association appeared to strengthen over the sampling period rather than fade overnight. The pattern was conditional on a second-order interaction between stable traits and fluctuating cognitive load: among conscientious workers the association held even on heavy days, whereas among neurotic workers it weakened to non-significance once load ran high.

Because the data are observational and longitudinal rather than experimental, we frame these findings as associations rather than causal effects. They nonetheless recast boundary work as a daily, effortful, and conditionally successful act, extend conservation of resources theory and boundary theory into the digital domain, and caution against uniform after-hours disconnection mandates in favor of support weighted toward overloaded and emotionally reactive workers.