Published In

Personnel Psychology

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-8-2024

Subjects

Employment -- Work stress, Work -- Treatment -- Social aspects

Abstract

Despite consistent findings that stressed employees benefit from social support, these employees do not always have access to such support. We propose and test a conceptual model suggesting employee work stress will negatively affect supervisory career and psychosocial mentoring support. Drawing from social exchange theory, we predict this will indirectly affect employee career success (lower career satisfaction and promotability ratings, fewer promotions), and that the relationship between employee work stress and lower supervisory mentoring support can be explained by lower levels of work engagement experienced by, and attributed to, stressed employees. We tested our model across three studies. In Study 1, we collected four waves of multisource field data (254 employees, 127 managers, and company records) at a large postal organization in the United Kingdom (UK). Employee work stress was negatively related to supervisor career and psychosocial mentoring support, and indirectly affected career satisfaction and manager promotability ratings of employees via supervisor career mentoring support. Cross-lagged panel analyses in a supplemental study additionally supported the proposed directionality of relationships. Study 2 included data across three waves from employees in Hong Kong (n = 137) and showed that employee work stress had indirect effects on supervisor career and psychosocial mentoring via lower employee engagement. In Study 3, using data from supervisors in the UK (n = 240) we showed that supervisor perceived employee stress had indirect effects on their provision of supervisor career and psychosocial mentoring support via lower perceived employee engagement.

Rights

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original workis properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.© 2024 The Author(s). Personnel Psychology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

DOI

10.1111/peps.12662

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42656

Included in

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