From Social Burden to Support Elicitation: Development and Validation of a New Measure of Workplace Support Elicitation Experiences

Abstract

Receiving social support is widely considered a positive workplace phenomenon, but what about the employees from whom the support is being sought? Following recent calls from social support scholars, we focus on the "potential support provider" perspective of the social support dynamic and propose that the measure of social burden (Yang et al., 2016) currently used to capture this dynamic is significantly limited. In Study 1, we refine and expand the measure of social burden by constructing and validating a measure of support elicitation experiences (SEE) that distinguishes between emotionally laden SEE (SEE-E; explicit or implicit requests for support with an emotional valence) and instrumental SEE (SEE-I; explicit requests for work-related support). In Study 2, based on Conservation of Resources Theory, we examine how SEE-E and SEE-I differentially relate to work outcomes and explore the potential costs of providing support in response to these behaviors. Results demonstrate that our measure of SEE is an improvement over the social burden measure and support the empirical distinctiveness of emotionally laden (associated with negative outcomes) and instrumental (associated with positive outcomes) support elicitations. In addition, we find some evidence that routinely providing support for both SEE-E and SEE-I carries implications for undesirable workplace behavior. Findings from this research support the notion that there are often differential effects for the kinds of support we elicit from our colleagues and provides researchers with an improved instrument to assess the social support dynamic from the perspective of potential support providers.

It's just (family) business: The impact of familial work experience on perceived qualification and hireability during the selection process

“…We recruited 427 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to participate in Study 1 (e.g., Bowling & Zelazny, 2021; Gallagher et al, 2022). Participants needed to be at working at least part‐time (i.e., 20 non‐MTurk hours per week), be over the age of 18, pass a CAPCHA (to demonstrate humanness), be working and living with the United States, and pass a brief 4‐item synonym recognition test to demonstrate satisfactory comprehension of the English language (e.g., Hughes et al, 2022) participate.…”

The other side of emotional support: The moderating role of personality in the relations between emotionally‐valenced support elicitation experiences and strain

“…someone crying or becoming audibly frustrated near you), it can be unclear as to who exactly should be providing support or whether support is wanted by the focal employee. Indeed, Gallagher et al (2022) suggested that the deleterious main effects study contribute to the nascent findings surrounding the potential support provider perspective of the workplace social support dynamic and further demonstrate the importance of individual differences to stressor-strain dynamics.…”

“…One of these novel perspectives is the potential support provider perspective, wherein social support dynamics are assessed from the point of view of those who are placed in positions to provide support to others (e.g. Gallagher et al, 2022; Yang et al, 2016).…”

“…Key work in this area comes from Gallagher et al (2022), who created a measure to assess support elicitation experiences (SEE) from the potential support provider perspective. One form of SEE concerns emotionally‐valenced elicitations for social support, or SEE‐E, which are affectively laden events that place employees in positions to potentially provide support.…”

“…someone crying or becoming audibly frustrated near you), it can be unclear as to who exactly should be providing support or whether support is wanted by the focal employee. Indeed, Gallagher et al (2022) suggested that the deleterious main effects of SEE‐E are likely to be, in part, caused by the ambiguity surrounding the potential support response. Further adding to the stressfulness of these elicitations, instances of SEE‐E contravene common workplace social norms, wherein people are expected to be polite, composed, and focused on formal job tasks (Stryker & Vryan, 2006).…”