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The crossover of self-esteem: A longitudinal perspective
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This longitudinal study examined the crossover of performance self-esteem within working couples. We focused on the long-term crossover process as well as its work-related consequences. We hypothesized that one partner’s (the actor’s) performance self-esteem relates to changes in the other partner’s (the partner’s) performance self-esteem over time, especially if the partner has a low level of baseline performance self-esteem. In a final step, we expected that the partner’s performance self-esteem at Time 2 in turn predicts the partner’s work engagement. Using a longitudinal study (time lag: 6 months) among 294 dual-earner couples, we tested our hypotheses with multilevel analyses applying the Actor–Partner Interdependence Model. The actor’s performance self-esteem at Time 1 did not directly relate to the partner’s performance self-esteem at Time 2. However, as expected, we found a significant moderation of the partner’s baseline performance self-esteem in the crossover process, indicating that especially individuals with a rather low baseline performance self-esteem are susceptible to performance self-esteem crossover. Finally, the partner’s performance self-esteem was related to the partner’s work engagement at Time 2.
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... In light of established crossover effects of strain, Westman has made repeated calls (Westman, 2002(Westman, , 2013 for attention to positive crossover, or the transmission of positive events or feelings among relationship partners. To this end, researchers have found evidence for crossover of energy, motivation, subjective well-being (Demerouti, 2012), job-related self-efficacy (Neff, Niessen, Sonnentag, & Unger, 2013), self-esteem (Neff, Sonnentag, Niessen, & Unger, 2015), and family cohesion (Huffman, Matthews, & Irving, 2017). Existing research suggests that theoretically grounded examinations of positive and negative transmissions between partners are essential for better understanding of dual-earner couples. ...
... Given that crossover theory is typically expressed in terms of negative strain states, Westman (2001) discussed that in situations where an employee experiences greater stress or strain, the "donor" partner will share resources with and/or empathetically experience the demands of the "needy," burned out employee. Likewise, self-expansion theory, as offered by Aron et al. (2005) and utilized by Neff et al. (2015), further supports the sharing of resources in that partners view each other as an extension of themselves. Thus, theory suggests the partner, based on their perceptions of the employee, empathically responds to employee experiences as though the partner him or herself is personally experiencing them and dedicates resources as needed to address any resource-deficits. ...
We propose and test a Resource-Based Spillover-Crossover-Spillover Model (RB-SCSM) of how an employer's provision of family support resources to an employee ultimately relates to his or her partner's improved experiences at his or her work as part of a mesosystem-to-mesosystem resource transmission process. Based on a dyadic examination of 262 full-time dual-earner couples, consistent with prior research, we found that when employees perceive their organization is family supportive, they experience less work-to-family conflict, and in turn, less burnout. Building on these individual-level effects in novel ways, we demonstrate that when an employee reports less burnout, their partner perceives the employee as less burned out. Moreover, when partners perceive less employee burnout, they perceive the employee provides more emotional support for the partner's work, directly and indirectly through the family overload that the partner experiences. Finally, when the partner receives more family support for his or her work, this spills over to and is related to the partner's greater investment in his or her relationships at work. Thus, our findings empirically demonstrate a resource-based transmission from one organization to another through dynamics occurring in the family. Suggestions for practical implementation are provided, as are suggestions for future theoretically grounded research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
... Thus, it appears that responding to experienced stress with a spiral of available resources (as described by the COR model; Hobfoll, 1989) can be further boosted by the available resources of your spouse, via the crossover process. Thus, having a spouse and/or a close colleague with high levels of selfesteem for example, can via crossover, boost your own levels of self-esteem, adding to your pool of available resources (i.e., resource gain spiral; Hobfoll, 1989), and assisting both you and you partner to manage your work stress experiences (Neff et al., 2015). Neff, Sonnentag, Niessen, and Unger (2012) explained this process with self-expansion theory (Aron, Mashek, & Aron, 2004), whereby during an intimate relationship, individuals increasingly incorporate their partners' resources, perspectives, and identities into their own self. ...
This chapter describes the interpersonal transfer process of stress, emotions, and experiences, known as crossover. It defines and differentiates between spillover and crossover and discusses the three main theoretical explanations of the crossover process. It also explains how the crossover process includes the transfer of both positive and negative emotions and experiences, and how recent work has demonstrated the transmission of resources (e.g., self-esteem and social support), between spouses. The chapter also discusses the impact of culture and gender on the crossover process. Finally, it reviews emerging research assessing how crossover operates between team members and how team leaders “affect” their team members via crossover (and vice versa).
... These findings are supported by previous research as Yang, Zhang, Kwan, and Chen (2018) found a positive relationship between organization based self-esteem and quality of life. Neff, Sonnentag, Niessen, and Unger (2015) found that organization based self-esteem is positively associated with the performance of employees. Similarly, Kim et al. (2015) investigated employee selfconcepts and found that there is a positive relationship between individuals' organization based self-esteem and perceived employability. ...
... The recent emphasis on the transfer of resources is particularly pertinent. For example, Neff, Sonnentag, Niessen, and Unger (2015) demonstrated the crossover of self-esteem and self-efficacy from one partner to another, describing how a partner can function as a 'resource supply' for their spouse. By transferring resources from the individual to their spouse, the spouses' levels of work engagement were also subsequently enhanced, creating a spiral of gains that illustrates, for example, how resource caravans function (Hobfoll, 1989). ...
Objective
Psychological crossover is the interpersonal transfer of stress. Details of how this transfer actually occurs are scarce, causing difficulties for advancement of crossover research. Crossover research has also suffered from a sampling bias, traditionally assessing the extent to which a husband's work stressors are transferred to his wife. Clearly, with the advent of both dual‐income and dual‐career partners, this research sampling method requires updating. The research reported here directly addresses these two issues and reports on an original model mapping the crossover process.
Method
The research adopted a qualitative method of enquiry in order to explore the crossover process afresh. Dyadic interviews were conducted with 16 dual‐earner couples who were both employed full time.
Results
Template analysis of the transcribed data revealed the existence of both negative (e.g., strain) and positive (e.g., well‐being) crossover experiences between the couples. These crossover experiences followed a five‐step process: (1) work event experienced; (2) impact of work event; (3) transfer of impact to partner; (4) impact on partner's well‐being and work performance; and (5) dyadic outcomes.
Conclusions
This research advances recent discussions of the crossover process by supporting the five‐step Crossover Process Model. The findings support the occurrence of both negative and positive crossover of emotions, although negative work stressors were found to be the most commonly experienced initiator of crossover. Importantly, this research demonstrated that neither the gender of the initiating partner nor the gender of the recipient partner significantly influenced the crossover process.
... Furthermore, Neff et al. (2013a) showed that the crossover of job-related self-efficacy was indirectly linked to the partner's perceived work engagement. In a longitudinal study of crossover of performance self-esteem, Neff et al. (2013b) showed that when the partner had low baseline performance self-esteem, one's performance self-esteem at Time 1 predicted changes in the partner's performance self-esteem at Time 2, illustrating how resource caravans (Hobfoll 2011b) transmitted. Such a transfer of resource caravans triggers the accumulation of resources that COR theory describes as a gain spiral (Hobfoll 2002(Hobfoll , 2011a). ...
Over the past 30 years, conservation of resources (COR) theory has become one of the most widely cited theories in organizational psychology and organizational behavior. COR theory has been adopted across the many areas of the stress spectrum, from burnout to traumatic stress. Further attesting to the theory’s centrality, COR theory is largely the basis for the more work-specific leading theory of organizational stress, namely the job demands-resources model. One of the major advantages of COR theory is its ability to make a wide range of specific hypotheses that are much broader than those offered by theories that focus on a single central resource, such as control, or that speak about resources in general. In this article, we will revisit the principles and corollaries of COR theory that inform those more specific hypotheses and will review research in organizational behavior that has relied on the theory. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior Volume 5 is January 21, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Purpose
Drawing upon the conservation of resources theory, this study aims to investigate whether, how and when salespeople’s substantive attribution of the organization’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects value-based selling (VBS). The authors argue that salespeople’s substantive CSR attribution increase value-based selling through two mechanisms (i.e. by lowering emotional exhaustion and increasing empathy), and treatment by customers can increase or decrease the strength of these relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
B2B salespeople working in various industries in China were recruited through snowball sampling to participate in the study. There were 462 volunteers (57.58% women; aged 30–55; tenure ranging from six months to 15 years) who provided valid self-report questionnaires.
Findings
Hierarchical multiple regression supported the association between salespeople’s substantive CSR attribution and VBS. The results showed that salespeople’s emotional state (i.e. emotional exhaustion and empathy) mediated the association between substantive CSR attribution and VBS. As expected, salespeople’s experiences of customer incivility weakened the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion; contrary to expectations, customer-initiated interpersonal justice weakened the mediation effect of empathy.
Originality/value
This study makes a unique contribution to the existing marketing literature by first investigating the role of salespeople’s attribution of CSR motives in facilitating their VBS, which answers the call to identify factors that predict VBS. In addition, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors are the first to test salespeople’s emotions as a mechanism of the link between their CSR attributions and selling behaviors.
Many employees think about their work during off-job time. Scholars have suggested that whether work-related thoughts during off-job time have detrimental or beneficial effects on employees’ well-being and performance depends on the nature of these thoughts. In this study with dual-earner couples we examined whether employees’ positive and negative work reflection during off-job time are associated with their own and with their partners’ work engagement and exhaustion. Furthermore, we investigated whether (a) living with children and (b) being work-linked (i.e. working in the same organisation and/or working in the same profession) moderated these relations. Both partners of 130 German heterosexual dual-earner couples responded to online questionnaires. We estimated multilevel analyses using the actor–partner interdependence model to analyse our dyadic data. We found positive associations between employees’ positive work reflection and both their own and their partners’ work engagement. Employees’ positive work reflection was also associated with their decreased exhaustion. Employees’ negative work reflection was negatively associated with their own work engagement and positively associated with their own exhaustion but unrelated to their partners’ outcomes. Moderator analyses revealed that living with children weakened the link between employees’ positive work reflection and their own work engagement and strengthened the link between their negative work reflection and exhaustion. The presence of couples’ work-linkage did not moderate any of these relations. This study builds on previous research by showing that employees’ positive work-related thinking is not only beneficial to themselves but also to their partners. Furthermore, the results suggest that living with children constitutes an additional demand that reduces the motivational effects of positive work reflection and amplifies the detrimental effects of employees’ negative work reflection.
In this chapter, we extend the theoretical framework of the crossover process to include the role of social support and leadership. First, we define the crossover process and review past research. Second, we address the crossover of positive emotions and experiences and new issues in crossover research, including the spillover-crossover model and crossover of resources. We then focus on social support, an important factor in crossover, its forms, sources, and buffering effect. We demonstrate crossover effects between leaders and followers and their underlying mechanisms. We conclude with implications and an agenda for future research.
Conservation of resources (COR) theory was originally introduced as a framework for understanding and predicting the consequences of major and traumatic stress, but following the work of Hobfoll and Shirom (1993), COR theory has been adopted to understanding and predicting work-related stress and both the stress and resilience that occur within work settings and work culture. COR theory underscores the critical role of resource possession, lack, loss and gain and depicts personal, social and material resources co-travelling in resource caravans, rather than piecemeal. We briefly review the principles of COR theory and integrate it in the crossover model, which provides a key mechanism for multi-person exchange of emotions, experiences and resources. Understanding the impact of resource reservoirs, resource passageways and crossover provides a framework for research and intervention promoting resilience to employees as well as to organizations. It emphasizes that the creation and maintenance of resource caravan passageways promote resource gain climates through resource crossover processes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Two studies examined the rank-order stability of self-esteem from age 6 to 83: Study 1 was a meta-analysis of 50 published articles (N = 29,839) and Study 2 analyzed data from 4 large national studies (N = 74,381). Self-esteem showed substantial continuity over time (disattenuated correlations ranged from the .50s to .70s), comparable to the stability found for personality traits. Both studies provided evidence for a robust developmental trend: Self-esteem stability was low during childhood, increased throughout adolescence and young adulthood, and declined during midlife and old age. This trend could not be explained by age differences in the reliability of self-esteem measures, and generally replicated across gender, ethnicity, self-esteem scale, nationality (U.S. vs. non-U.S.), and year of publication.
Studies investigating the crossover of job stress and strain between partners have shown that job demands are transmitted from job incumbents to their partners, affecting their psychological and physical health. Based on the crossover literature and on models of job stress and the work-family interface, this study develops a comprehensive framework to integrate the literature conceptually delineating the mechanisms that underlie the crossover process. Key constructs include job stress, life events, strain, personal attributes and interpersonal factors, The literature pertaining to each construct in the model is reviewed and summarized. Gaps in the literature are identified, recommendations for future research are proposed, and the implications for organizational theory and practice are discussed.
In this chapter, we examine the psychological state of employee work engagement. Our objective is to provide an overview of the engagement construct, clarify its definition, and discuss its behavioral outcomes. We discuss the development of the work engagement construct, which has led to many inconsistencies among scholars about its definition. We clarify that engagement captures employees' strong focus of attention, intense absorption, and high energy toward their work-related tasks. Work engagement is important to the positive organizational scholarship (POS) field because engagement can lead to a number of positive outcomes, such as in-role and extra-role performance, client satisfaction, proactivity, adaptivity, and creativity. Managers, however, must ensure that employees have adequate resources and sufficient breaks, so that engagement does not lead to burnout or depletion. We encourage scholars interested in studying engagement in the future to investigate the contextual moderators that affect the relationship between engagement and employee behavior and examine the differential effects of the components of engagement-attention, absorption, and energy.
In 4 studies, the authors examined interpersonal perceptions as a function of self-construals and ego threats for those with high and low self-esteem. Previous research (T. F. Heatherton & K. D. Vohs, 2000a) found that after threat, high self-esteem people were rated as less likable by an unacquainted dyad partner, whereas low self-esteem people were rated as more likable. Study 1 showed that after threat, high self-esteem people seek competency feedback, whereas low self-esteem people seek interpersonal feedback. Study 2 showed that high self-esteem people become more independent after threat, whereas low self-esteem people become more interdependent. Study 3 linked differences in independence versus interdependence to interpersonal evaluations. Study 4 found that differences in independent and interdependent self-construals statistically accounted for differences in likability and personality perceptions of high and low self-esteem people after threat. Thus, the combination of threat and self-esteem alters people's focus on different self-aspects, which consequently leads to different interpersonal appraisals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
We theorize that engagement, conceptualized as the investment of an individual's complete self into a role, provides a more comprehensive explanation of relationships with performance than do well-known concepts that reflect narrower aspects of the individual's self. Results of a study of 245 firefighters and their supervisors supported our hypotheses that engagement mediates relationships between value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluations, and two job performance dimensions: task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. Job involvement, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation were included as mediators but did not exceed engagement in explaining relationships among the antecedents and performance outcomes.
This study examined the effects of procedural justice on state-dependent self-esteem using the group-value model and attribution theory to present competing theoretical perspectives. The group-value model predicts a positive relationship between self-esteem and fair procedures. in contrast, attribution theory suggests procedural fairness interacts with outcome favorability to influence self-esteem. Thus, fair procedures will result in higher self-esteem ratings than unfair procedures when the outcome is positive but will result in lower self-esteem ratings than unfair procedures when the outcome is negative. The results of a laboratory and field study provide converging evidence to support the attribution theory predictions. The results of a 2nd laboratory study suggest that self-esteem is influenced by outcome expectancies, not actual outcomes.
Five studies tested hypotheses derived from the sociometer model of self-esteem according to which the self-esteem system monitors others' reactions and alerts the individual to the possibility of social exclusion. Study 1 showed that the effects of events on participants' state self-esteem paralleled their assumptions about whether such events would lead others to accept or reject them. In Study 2, participants' ratings of how included they felt in a real social situation correlated highly with their self-esteem feelings. In Studies 3 and 4, social exclusion caused decreases in self-esteem when respondents were excluded from a group for personal reasons, but not when exclusion was random, but this effect was not mediated by self-presentation. Study 5 showed that trait self-esteem correlated highly with the degree to which respondents generally felt included versus excluded by other people. Overall, results provided converging evidence for the sociometer model.
Interest in the problem of method biases has a long history in the behavioral sciences. Despite this, a comprehensive summary of the potential sources of method biases and how to control for them does not exist. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which method biases influence behavioral research results, identify potential sources of method biases, discuss the cognitive processes through which method biases influence responses to measures, evaluate the many different procedural and statistical techniques that can be used to control method biases, and provide recommendations for how to select appropriate procedural and statistical remedies for different types of research settings.
Past research has revealed that social comparisons often lead to contrast effects in self-evaluation (such that people who encounter a highly talented person come to feel less talented by comparison). In this report, however, it is argued that when people possess confidently held self-views in a particular area, they are unlikely to engage in explicit social comparisons with close others. Instead, they assume that because ''birds of a feather flock together,'' the strengths and weaknesses of their close relationship partners reflect directly (rather than comparatively) on themselves. A cross-sectional survey, a prospective survey, and a quasi-experiment all supported this idea. The implications of these findings for social comparison and for self-regulation are discussed.