As such, sleep and circadian rhythms and their relationship to employee productivity, safety, and health are important concerns for human resource management. In addition, many organizational demands, such as shiftwork and travel, challenge our circadian rhythms and create a sustained physiological drive for sleep. When organizations create an environment that increases work requirements, this creates additional stress beyond simply the work demands for the employee as well as the employee’s family including poor sleep and other social and health concerns ( Mariappanadar, 2014). The organization can also have an impact on our endogenous need for sleep and our circadian rhythms. Furthermore, our endogenous circadian rhythms impact not only our sleep-wake cycle by encouraging us to sleep at night but also affect our daytime alertness and performance.

Poor or inadequate sleep also has a negative impact on many longer-term factors relevant to organizational behavior and personal health including self-control and decision making ( Hagger, 2014 Pilcher et al., 2015b), subjective effort ( Engle-Friedman and Riela, 2004), immunosuppression ( Irwin, 2015), and a variety of performance measures ( Lim and Dinges, 2010). In the short-term and perhaps at the most basic level, sleep makes us less sleepy and more alert. Sleep impacts many aspects of employee’s work performance including the ability to adequately respond to rapidly changing work demands and stress-inducing environments and interactions. Sleep is an influential component of human health and effective daily functioning and yet is often undervalued in many organizations. Human resources and employees should emphasize the impact of good sleep and sleep habits on organizational and individual productivity and safety. Developing a deeper understanding of how sleep habits and sleepiness impact workers and the organization can help provide the necessary background for human resource management to develop more progressive support networks for employees that benefit both the worker and the organization. It is important to examine how sleep habits and workplace behaviors relate and the role of the underlying circadian rhythm on the potential impact of sleep and sleepiness in the workplace. Although it is well established that quantity and quality of sleep can affect different types of task performance and personal health, the interactions between sleep habits and organizational behaviors have received much less attention.

The interaction between sleep and work-related behaviors influence many aspects of employee performance, safety, and health as well as organizational-level success. Department of Psychology, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, United States.

Workplace efficiency