Employee Physical Activity: A Multidisciplinary Integrative Review

Abstract

While physical activity is widely recognized to be relevant to employee well-being and organizational health care costs, the management literature has yet to clarify when, how, and why employee physical activity influences job performance. Therefore, the goal of this review is to provide a cross-disciplinary synthesis of evidence surrounding the implications of physical activity for job performance. After first conducting an emergent systematic review of the management literature to verify our assertion that this research base has inadequately addressed the relationship between physical activity and job performance, we performed a cross-disciplinary review of six key disciplines (sports sciences, public environmental occupational health, general medicine internal, physiology, neuroscience, and psychology/psychiatry) to develop a resource-based framework that serves to identify how physical activity relates to job performance. This unifying framework is intended to guide future research on employee physical activity. As an initial application of this framework, we provide a set of future research directions centered on empirically evaluating proposed mechanisms, boundary conditions, and temporal factors that can inform physical activity research in organizational contexts.