Why and for whom does the pressure to help hurt others? Affective and cognitive mechanisms linking helping pressure to workplace deviance

Scholars are paying increasing attention to the “dark side” of citizenship behavior. One aspect of this dark side that has received relatively scant attention is “helping pressure”—an employee's perception that s/he is being encouraged to, or otherwise feels that s/he should, enact helping behavior at work. Drawing from theory associated with work stress, we examine affective and cognitive mechanisms that potentially explain why helping pressure, counterintuitively, may lead employees to engage in deviant behavior instead. Beyond examining these possible mechanisms, we also answer calls to identify a potential buffer to these effects. Drawing from self-determination theory, we examine how an employee's intrinsic motivation for citizenship may lessen the deleterious consequences of helping pressure at work. In two studies (a within-individual experience-sampling study and a two-wave between-individual study), we find consistent evidence that helping pressure has a positive indirect relationship with deviant behavior through increased negative affect. Further, we find evidence that intrinsic motivation for citizenship weakens the positive relationship of helping pressure with negative affect, buffering the indirect effect on subsequent deviant behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for the study of helping pressure at work are discussed.     

Helping others or helping oneself? An episodic examination of the behavioral consequences of helping at work

Scholars have paid an increasing amount of attention to organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), with a particular emphasis on helping others at work. In addition, recent empirical work has focused on how OCB is an intraindividual phenomenon, such that employees vary daily in the extent to which they help others. However, one limitation of this research has been an overemphasis on well‐being consequences associated with daily helping (e.g., changes in affect and mental depletion) and far less attention on behavioral outcomes. In this study, we develop a self‐regulatory framework that articulates how helping others at work is a depleting experience that can lead to a reduction in subsequent acts of helping others, and an increase in behaviors aimed at helping oneself (i.e., engaging in political acts). We further theorize how two individual differences—prevention focus and political skill—serve as cross‐level moderators of these relations. In an experience sampling study of 91 full‐time employees across 10 consecutive workdays, our results illustrate that helping is a depleting act that makes individuals more likely to engage in self‐serving acts and less likely to help others. Moreover, the relation of helping acts with depletion is strengthened for employees who have higher levels of prevention focus.     

Revisiting the role of recollection in item versus forced-choice recognition memory

Many memory theorists have assumed that forced-choice recognition tests can rely more on familiarity, whereas item (yes-no) tests must rely more on recollection. In actuality, several studies have found no differences in the contributions of recollection and familiarity underlying the two different test formats. Using word frequency to manipulate stimulus characteristics, the present study demonstrated that the contributions of recollection to item versus forced-choice tests is variable. Low word frequency resulted in significantly more recollection in an item test than did a forced-choice procedure, but high word frequency produced the opposite result. These results clearly constrain any uniform claim about the degree to which recollection supports responding in item versus forced-choice tests.     

Against all odds – is a more differentiated view of personality development in emerging adulthood needed? The case of young apprentices

Personality development in emerging adults who do not attend college after high school has been largely overlooked so far. In this study, we investigated personality development in emerging German adults (N_T1 = 1,886, M_ageT1 = 18.01 years, 29% female) undergoing vocational education and training (VET). The trainees were assessed at the start of VET, 1.5 years later, and another 1.5 years after that, just before graduation. Longitudinal latent change score analyses were applied. Bivariate analyses investigated life satisfaction and job strain as social and work‐related aspects that are potentially reciprocally related to personality development. Mean‐level personality changes included increases in neuroticism and decreases in agreeableness and conscientiousness in the first interval. In the second interval, neuroticism decreased and conscientiousness increased. Simultaneously, trainees reported a gradual decrease in extraversion and openness across the 3‐year time span. Personality, especially agreeableness and conscientiousness, emerged as a stronger predictor of changes in job strain and life satisfaction than vice versa. For example, more agreeable and more conscientious trainees subsequently showed increases in life satisfaction. Trainees reporting higher job strain subsequently showed decreases in agreeableness. Trajectories of personality development partly support the maturity principle that has been established in many college student samples.     

Does feedback matter for job search self-regulation? It depends on feedback quality

Job search represents a dynamic process through which job seekers must consistently engage in effective self-regulation. Although scholars have increasingly begun to theorize and conceptualize the job search in this manner, little is known about what fosters effective self-regulation week-to-week. In light of this theoretical gap, we integrate self-regulation theory with the feedback literature to examine how feedback quality influences affective, cognitive, and behavioral regulatory processes in job search. Furthermore, we examine feedback self-efficacy (i.e., how efficacious a job seeker feels with respect to processing and implementing feedback received during the job search) as a stable, person-level moderator of these within-person relationships. In a sample of job seekers surveyed once a week for seven weeks, results indicate that receiving high-quality feedback has a direct influence on positive and negative affective reactions tied to the job search, influencing subsequent positive (i.e., metacognitive strategies) and negative (i.e., affective rumination) cognitive processes. Metacognitive strategies, in turn, impact both the number of résumés sent and hours spent job seeking each week. Moreover, lower feedback self-efficacy amplifies the relationship between feedback quality and negative affective reactions. Our results highlight the importance of high-quality feedback in helping job seekers effectively regulate week-to-week.     

Compression of environmental representations following interactions with objects

Previous work reveals that interacting with all objects in an environment can compress spatial memory for the entire group of objects. To assess the scope and magnitude of this effect, we tested whether interacting with a subset of objects compresses spatial memory for all objects in an environment. Participants inspected objects in one or two unmarked regions of space, then recalled the distances between pairs of objects from memory. One group of participants picked up objects in both regions, a second group picked up objects in one region and passively viewed objects in the other region, and a third group passively viewed objects in both regions. When participants manually interacted with objects, they recalled shorter object-pair distances throughout the environment. The magnitude of this effect was the same, regardless of whether participants interacted with all objects in the environment or just a subset of them. Together, these findings suggest that interacting with objects can compress environmental representations in memory, even when observers interact with a relatively small subset of objects.     

Self-Disclosure and Spiritual Well-Being in Pastors Seeking Professional Psychological Help

Pastoral mental health is a topic that has only rarely been researched empirically in the psychological literature, yet a pastor’s mental health can have a significant impact on churches, communities, and even nations (Royal and Thompson, Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 31(3), 195–204, 2012). One of the thoughts prompting this research is that evangelical pastors might be expected to resist the findings of psychological research and lack understanding of specific mental illnesses they are potentially facing. Combined with historical and cultural dynamics that could influence resistance to professional psychological help, evangelical pastors have personal, internal factors that could also strengthen resistance, including the researched issues of self-disclosure flexibility and spiritual well-being. A correlational research design with multivariate regression was used to determine potentially significant or predictive relationships between the relevant factors. Among evangelical seminary students (N = 251) preparing for parish-based pastoral ministry, this research determined that no significant relationship, predictive or otherwise, existed between self-disclosure flexibility, spiritual well-being, and attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help. Implications include a shift in focus toward external factors influencing pastors’ help-seeking attitudes, such as the need for the mental health community to develop connections with evangelical pastors and the development of more support for Christian mental health professionals in the larger evangelical community.     

Particularism about Composition

Unwilling to adopt the radical ontologies that leading answers to van Inwagen's special composition question imply, Ned Markosian proposes that there is no true, non‐trivial, and finitely long answer to the SCQ. On my usage, this makes Markosian a particularist about composition. I argue that an improved version of Markosian's particularism fails because it cannot explain how sense perception justifies many of the ordinary‐object beliefs we base on it. I further argue that psychologists' research on object perception suggests that general principles govern how we perceptually discriminate unified wholes from mere pluralities, and this narrows the range of answers to the SCQ available to commonsense ontologists.