Organizations are increasingly embracing urgency-driven cultures, prioritizing speed and immediacy as critical for success. However, such temporality around urgency poses a significant threat to employee well-being, a consequence that has been largely overlooked in the literature. Drawing on restricted employee sustainability theory (REST) and scarcity theory, this study tests the effect of organizational temporality around urgency on recovery experiences and behaviors by revealing the trade-offs inherent in such environments. Using three-wave data from full-time employees (N = 358), our findings reveal that organizational urgency is linked to deferred recovery as employees prioritize extra work behaviors, offering preliminary evidence for the REST framework. Furthermore, attentional tunneling emerged as a distinct mechanism explaining how organizational urgency undermines recovery. This research highlights the critical importance of the temporal context within organizations, offering early empirical support for the REST framework while highlighting the organizations’ role in employee recovery and fostering more sustainable work environments.
