Honeymoon-Hangover Effect

The honeymoon-hangover effect is a pattern in organizational psychology describing how job satisfaction changes around a voluntary job change, first hypothesized and documented in a 2005 study by Wendy R. Boswell and her co-authors. Job satisfaction typically declines in the period before an employee leaves their old position, then rises sharply once they start the new job, an initial honeymoon effect, before gradually declining again over time back toward a baseline level, the hangover effect that gives the pattern its name. Later research has produced mixed evidence for the pattern, supporting it in some studies and contradicting it in others, and has identified factors that shape how strongly a given person experiences it, including personality traits, how well the new job actually fits the person's skills and education, their initial experiences in the new role, whether the move represents upward or lateral career mobility, and how they felt about the job they left.