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

Introduction: 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. Methods: 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. Results: 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. Discussion: 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.