Workers regularly report high levels of stress and burnout because of their daily interactions at work. Workers also tend to seek social support as a mechanism to reduce stress and burnout. Social support buffers the negative effects of stress on health-related outcomes and is inversely associated with both burnout and perceived stress. However, recent research has revealed that not all social support is beneficial. Co-rumination, or excessive negative problem talk about an issue, has been linked to increasing levels of stress and burnout. Working adults (N = 447) completed a survey exploring the relationships between social support, co-rumination, stress, and burnout. Two mediation models predicted that co-rumination would suppress the relationships between social support and both burnout and perceived stress. Data supported both partial mediation hypotheses. This study concludes that some social support can be less-than-beneficial, if the content of the supportive transaction focuses on excessive and negative problem talk.

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Graduate students regularly report high levels of stress and burnout. Many of those same students utilize social support networks, which can act as stress buffers. This study evaluated excessive negative talk about issues (co-rumination) and its effects on that social-support to burnout (emotional exhaustion) relationship and predicted that co-rumination would act as a suppressor variable. Graduate student volunteers (N = 213) reported their levels of social support, co-rumination, and emotional exhaustion. Data indicated that co-rumination did mediate the social support-to-emotional exhaustion relationship on two dimensions. This project purports that, while social support is important, the content of socially-supportive interactions may also be important when attempting to intervene in stressful situations, especially when those interactions involve co-ruminative messages.

In this article, we conceptualized a new organizational variable, Communi catively Restricted Organizational Stress (CROS). CROS is a perceived inability to communicate about a particular stressor and functions to exacerbate negative outcomes related to the appraisal of that stressor. To aid in our conceptualization, we reviewed extant literature on organizational stress and social support. We also collected openended data from a national sample of 354 workers. The responses to these questions lead us to specific themes about the nature and function of CROS. Finally, we propose a conceptual conditional process model with two primary propositions: (a) An organizational member who reports high levels of CROS will experience negative outcomes, regardless of reported level of social support and (b) an organizational member who reports high levels of CROS will experience negative outcomes, regardless of the severity of the stressor.

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