Good and bad days at work

Received: 16 December 2021 | Revised: 16 February 2024 | Accepted: 10 April 2024 DOI: 10.1002/job.2796 REVIEW ARTICLE Good and bad days at work: A descriptive review of day-level and experience-sampling studies Sabine Sonnentag¹ | Jette Völker¹ | Wilken Wehr² ¹Department of Psychology, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany ²Department of Work and Social Psychology, University of Maastricht, Netherlands Correspondence Sabine Sonnentag, University of Mannheim, Department of Psychology, A5, 6 C104, D-68159 Mannheim, Germany. Email: sabine.sonnentag@uni-mannheim.de Summary Workdays are the main temporal building blocks of people's experiences at work, and many factors potentially contribute to having a good versus a bad day at work. Still, empirical findings on these questions are scattered and a bigger picture is missing. This article reviews day-level and experience-sampling studies (k = 382 studies) to describe what makes for a good versus bad day at work. We derive outcome criteria for good versus bad days from the circumflex model of affect and identify specific pre-work factors (sleep, pre-work events, and pre-work experiences) and at-work factors (situational conditions, states and experiences, behaviors, results of one's actions, and work breaks) as their core ingredients. We highlight temporal trends in this rapidly growing research area and critically assess the current state of the literature with respect to theoretical and methodological issues. We link empirical findings that have emerged from our literature review to a homeostatic human sustainability perspective, offer directions for future research, and discuss the practical implementation of research findings. KEYWORDS affect circumplex, diary studies, experience-sampling studies, systematic literature review, workday, well-being 1 | INTRODUCTION Days are primary building blocks of humans' experience of time, largely entrained by the earth's rotation and the associated light-dark cycle. In most jobs, work is organized into workdays or shifts as discrete time periods corresponding to the day as a core "temporal schema" that brings structure and order to the "abstract, fluid concept of time" (Shiio & Richardson, 2021, p. 300). Experiences unfolding at the day level predict people's longer-term health and evaluation of their lives (Charles et al., 2013; Mõwisch et al., 2019). Therefore, it is essential to understand which factors turn a workday into a happy and satisfying one and which factors leave employees angry or exhausted. Moreover, identifying factors of good versus bad days at work offers important benefits for understanding and designing worksdays. For instance, which situational factors help job holders feel good at work? Which behaviors should they pursue and which experiences should they try to or try to avoid? How can managers foster good days at work, for instance, by showing specific leadership behaviors or by making harmful events less likely? Can individuals do anyt