From playful work design to playful family design: How personality and compassionate love shape playfulness across domains

Abstract

Play is a universal phenomenon—but how universal is it across life domains? Playful work design (PWD) refers to self-initiated play during work activities to make tasks more fun and challenging. Drawing on the work–home resources model, we investigate whether PWD reduces job boredom and spills over into the home domain. To conceptualize this cross-domain dynamic, we introduce playful family design (PFD) as a novel construct that reflects the self-initiated pursuit of playfulness in family life. We also examine whether personal (playful personality) and relational (compassionate love) resources moderate the relationship between PWD and job boredom. We tested our hypotheses using a 10-day daily diary study with 706 full-time employees across nine countries (N = 4110 observations). Multilevel analyses showed that PWD significantly reduced job boredom and was positively associated with PFD. Furthermore, playful personality and compassionate love emerged as significant moderators. Our findings advance the playfulness literature by introducing PFD as a novel construct and by showing that playfulness may extend across work and family life while helping to reduce job boredom.