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Interest as a Moderator in the Relationship Between Challenge/Skills Balance and Flow at Work: An Analysis at Within-Individual Level

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Abstract

Considering flow as a non-ergodic process (i.e. non-homogeneous across individuals and non-stationary over time) that happens at the within-individual level, in this research we work with Bakker’s model that propose flow as made up by three components: intrinsic motivation, enjoyment, and absorption. Taking into account that flow theory can be considered as an intrinsic motivation theory, and the recent proposals about the need to distinguish between pre-conditions of flow and the flow experience itself, we look at interest as a moderator between the challenge/skills balance and the experience of flow, rather than a component of the flow experience. A total of 3640 recordings were collected from a sample of 58 workers using an experience sampling method (several registers a day, during 21 working days). The data was analyzed using regression techniques in each participant (i.e. at within-individual level). Our work tries to respond to the following two research questions: Will interest play a moderating role in the relationship between challenge/skills balance and flow? Will a non-linear model (cusp catastrophe model) better explain the relationship among challenge/skills balance, interest, and flow? The results suggest that our hypotheses were correct: including interest as moderator better explains the relationship between challenge/skills balance and flow in comparison to a model without moderation (R2 values change from 0.33 to 0.50). Additionally, carrying out the analysis following non-linear techniques explained more variance as well (R2 = 0.67), and this increment was significant. These results support the idea that interest should be considered as a key precondition for the appearance of flow, and this relationship is non-linear. We could say that these findings are exemplary in the field and brings up questions for their application in further research.

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Notes

  1. We are aware that there are authors who prefer to work considering as predictor only the CSB (e.g., Engeser and Rheinberg 2008). However, we rather prefer to follow the recommendations made by Moneta (2012) at this point and proposing challenge, skills and CSB as different predictors.

  2. It would be possible to present the results, participant per participant, of the three models tested to appreciate the estimate parameters in each model per each participant. This would have implied to present 174 tables of results (58 participants per 3 models tested), which is not possible to consider here.

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Acknowledgments

Financial support to CB given by the PsicoSAO Research Group (2014SGR992) is acknowledged. Financial support to JN given by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, project number PSI2013-44854-R) is also acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Céline Bricteux

  2. PsicoSAO Research Group, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Jose Navarro

  3. IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain

    Lucía Ceja

  4. Université Paris V: René Descartes, Paris, France

    Guillaume Fuerst

Authors
  1. Céline Bricteux
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  2. Jose Navarro
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  3. Lucía Ceja
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  4. Guillaume Fuerst
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jose Navarro.

Appendix

Appendix

R-codes of all models:

  • Model 1 lm(Flow1 ~ Challenge + Skill + CSB).

  • Model 2 lm(Flow2 ~ Challenge + Skill + CSB:Interest).

  • Model 3 cusp(y ~ Flow2, alpha ~ Interest, beta ~ Challenge + Skill + CSB).

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Bricteux, C., Navarro, J., Ceja, L. et al. Interest as a Moderator in the Relationship Between Challenge/Skills Balance and Flow at Work: An Analysis at Within-Individual Level. J Happiness Stud 18, 861–880 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-016-9755-8

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