Top Down Crossover Of Work

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Introduction

With the rapid development of positive psychology, work engagement has become a hot topic in psychology and organizational behavior literature in the past decades. Work engagement is defined as a positive, fulfilling, affective–motivational, work–related state which is characterized by vigor, absorption and dedication (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). Engaged workers have high level of energy and strong resilience to cope with difficulties and workload, are enthusiastic about work and happily immersed in work. Engaged employees are the key assets that drive the sustainable competitive advantage of the organization. In the modern world, teams are widely adopted in organizations. This study focus on the engagement issues in teams. The realization of the collective goal of a work team tremendously relies on the combined efforts of all the members, so it is important to keep the whole team engaged.

Work engagement has been found to transfer among individuals. Thus, engaged employees contribute to the team or the organization because of not only their personal performance but also their strengthening of others’ engagement. Despite of the surge interest in work engagement crossover, little attention has been paid to the work engagement of leaders. "Leadership is influence" (Maxwell, 1993, p. 1) and the influence may engage or disengage employees. "If it (work engagement) is something organizations are trying to do to employees rather than a quality that leaders are demonstrating through example, the interventions associated with engagement will fail (Welbourne, 2007, p.1)". This study aims to study the top–down crossover of work engagement from the team leader to followers.

The crossover of work engagement in teams has been verified, but the psychological mechanism mediating the crossover still needs to be explored. The current studies always attribute the crossover of work engagement to non–conscious emotional contagion and conscious empathy process. Emotional contagion is similar with but not identical to crossover of work engagement. Work engagement of one person can have not only affective but also cognitive and behavioral effects on the individual himself and thus other people will be influenced during the interpersonal interaction. What’s more, emotional contagion mainly refers to a temporary process while crossover of work engagement is more durable. Based on the difference between emotional contagion and work engagement crossover, further research is needed that throws light on the cognitive, psychological and behavioral process behind the crossover.

To fill the gap in the present literature, the current study is to both examine the top–down work engagement crossover in teams and explore the in–depth cause of it. We propose that perceived supervisor support is a "bridge" that links leaders’ engagement and follower’s. This study provides theoretical value and empirical support for the development of the literature of crossover in the workplace.

Theory and hypothesis development

Work engagement

Work engagement is an emerging concept in the positive organizational behavior literature. Work engagement has no universally agreed upon definition. Here we adopt Schaufeli and Bakker’s (2004) definition of work engagement as a positive and fulfilling work–related state characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. Vigor refers to high levels of energy and mental resilience while working, willingness to invest huge efforts in the job, and persistence in difficult situations. Dedication refers to strong involvement in work, with a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, challenge and pride. Absorption means being totally concentrated and happily immersed in work, whereby time passes quickly and one can hardly detach from work (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). Work engagement is not identical to related concepts like job embeddedness (Halbesleben & Wheeler, 2008) and workaholism (Schaufeli, Taris, & Rhenen, 2008).

Generally, work engagement can foster positive work outcomes. Studies revealed that engaged workers had better in–role and extra–role performance (Bakker, Demerouti & Verbek, 2004) and higher organizational commitment (Demerouti, Bakker, De Jonge, & Janssen, 2001).

Several studies also have explored the antecedents of work engagement. Job resources such as social support, performance feedback and autonomy are positively related to work engagement (Bakker & Demerouti, 2008;). Personal resources (e.g. self–efficacy and optimism) also contribute to engagement (Xanthopoulou, Bakker, Demerouti, & Schaufeli, 2009).

Crossover

Crossover refers to the interpersonal process that occurs when the psychological well–being (or psychological strain) experienced by one individual affects the level of well–being (or psychological strain) of another person in the same social environment (Bolger, Delongis, Kessler, & Wethington, 1989; Westman, 2001a). Most of the present studies of crossover are limited to the negative crossover of stain and job burnout. What’s more, researchers mainly base their theories on the work–family interface and focus on the crossover between spouses (e.g. Westman, 2011b; Westman, 1995). For example, Westman, Etzaion and Danon’s (2001) study of 98 married couples supported the crossover of burnout from husbands to wives and the effect of burnout on undermining behaviors. Westman (2001a) suggested that researchers should pay attention to the positive crossover (e.g. positive affect or job satisfaction) and increase research on the crossover in the workplace. According to Westman (2001a), individuals who share the same work environment may start a crossover chain. With greater interdependency and more team adopted, the possibility and frequency of crossover will rise.

Westman and Etzion (1999) conducted one of the earliest field studies on crossover in the workplace and found job–induced strain from school principals transferred to teachers and vice versa. Bakker, Van Emmerik, & Euwema’s (2006) study of Dutch constabulary officers demonstrated the crossover in teams by showing that team level burnout and work engagement were related to individual team members’ burnout and engagement with individuals’ job demands and resources controlled. Westman, Bakker, Roziner, & Sonnentag (2011) found that crossover of job demands and emotional exhaustion across time from the group to individual members only occurred in teams with high levels of cohesiveness and social support.

Although studies which provide support for the crossover of burnout or work engagement in teams emerge, more research is needed to explore the mechanisms, especially psychological mechanisms that cause the crossover. Researchers mainly owe the crossover to unconscious emotional contagion or conscious "tuning in" to others’ emotions (Bakker, Van Emmerik, & Euwema, 2006). Emotional contagion is a process in which one automatically mimics and synchronizes another’s facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements and consequently shapes the same emotion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994). Tuning in refers to the situation where one imagines how he or she will behave in the position of another and thus experiences the same feeling (Bakker et al., 2006).

Westman (2001) proposed a comprehensive theoretical framework about the process of stress and stain crossover. The model incorporated three mechanisms: a direct process, a spurious effect from common stressors or an indirect effect. In the direct process, strain in one partner leads to an empathetic reaction in the other and the other feel more stressed. The common stressors mechanism is that crossover comes from common stressors in a shared stressful environment. Last, the indirect effect posits a medicating and moderating effect. Coping mechanisms, social support and undermining can mediate the stress and strain responses. One of the propositions is that one’s stress and strain affect the coping strategies of his or her and the partner and further the partner’s stress and strain. Besides, a stressed individual requires social support from the other, which depletes the donor’s resources and increase stress. In addition, the strain of one increases his or her social undermining behaviors toward the other and enhances the partner’s depression. Crossover may be caused by one mechanism or several mechanisms concurrently.

Westman’s (2001) model inspires us to pay attention to the effect of interpersonal interaction on the crossover of work engagement. Stress is a predictor of burnout and work engagement is kind of an opposite concept of burnout. As a result, we can make the inverse deduction of the medicating mechanism of stress crossover. Engaged individuals tend to have the abilities and willingness to conduct social support behaviors and thus the support recipient will be driven to be engaged. Leaders have more power and resources than co–worker to influence employees, so we try to explore the specified crossover of work engagement from team leaders to individual followers in the present study. Next, we analyze the crossover and the mediation of perceived supervisor support in detail.

From Leader’s work engagement to follower’s work engagement

Welbourne (1998) put forward a role–based performance model that explains employee engagement by beginning with the end goal. The model includes five key roles that employees occupy at work: "Core job–holder role (what’s in the job description); Entrepreneur or innovator role (improving process, coming up with new ideas, participating in others’ innovations); Team member role (participating in teams, working with others in different jobs); Career role (learning, engaging in activities to improve personal skills and knowledge)" (Welbourne, 2007). Core roles can be easily replaced while non–core roles add competitive value to the organization.

Non–core job roles of employees are likely to be ignored or even hated by disengaged leaders, who has less interests and put less efforts in work than engaged leaders and just want to meet the minimum requirement of the organizations. Work for disengaged individuals is more a burden than a source of joy. As a result, leaders with low engagement mainly focus the final performance of the team and pay little attention to their followers’ potential needs. If the team leader is disengaged, followers may think their additional efforts will not be valued or rewarded and thus they may just finish the tasks they have no choice to reject and go to work to collect a paycheck. Welbourne (2007) stated that with leaders feeling confused, distracted, and overworked, employees perform worse. Her study of the energy data collected from employees throughout the world since 1996 shows that a decrease in leader energy leads to lower employee energy scores, which supports the proposal that followers’ work engagement starts with the leader’s engagement.

Besides, team leaders often require their followers to be committed to and enthusiast with work. When leaders do not walk the talk and lead by example, their subordinates will not be motivated to follow the request to go the extra mile for the team.

On the basis of the above arguments, it is reasonable to predict that team leaders’ engagement drives employees’ engagement and thus we formulate the first hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1: Team Leader’s work engagement positively relates to follower work engagement.

Leader’s work engagement and follower’s perceived supervisor support

Perceived supervisor support (PSS) refers to the extent to which followers perceive that their supervisors value their contributions and care about their well–being (Kottke & Sharafinski, 1988). Supervisor support belongs to social support, which means "a flow of emotional concern, instrumental aid, information and/or appraisal (information relevant to self–evaluation) between people" (House, 1981, p.26). Emotional support refers to the provision of caring, concern, empathy, comfort, reassuring and love, all of which can meet the basic social–emotional needs of the support receiver (House, 1981; Krause, 1986). Instrumental support refers to the provision of tangible assistance such as material resources or needed service (House, 1981; Tilden & Weinert, 1987). Informational support is defined as the provision of information that can help one to solve a particular problem during a time of stress (House, 1981; Tilden & Weinert, 1987). Appraisal support refers to the communication of information relevant to self–evaluation instead of problem–solving (House, 1981). It includes expressions that evaluate the appropriateness of words and deeds of the receiver (Kahn & Antonucci, 1980).

Leaders with higher level of work engagement tend to provide followers with more support because of the following reasons. First, leaders in high work engagement often experience positive emotions, such as happiness, joy, interest, and enthusiasm (Schaufeli & Van Rhenen, 2006), which can contribute to the willingness and abilities to support followers. Positive emotions can enhance leaders’ trust in their subordinates and promote leaders to build a friendly or close relationship with subordinates. As a result, leaders in higher engagement have more initiatives to care about the followers and provide emotional support. Based on the mood congruent effect (Forgas & Bower, 1987), leaders with positive emotions will be more sensitive to the achievements of the followers and provide positive appraisals and feedback, which can strengthen the cognition of the followers that leaders are concerned with their performance and take pride in their accomplishments. Besides, feeling positive affect has consistently been found to arouse more helpful, cooperative and prosocial behavior at the workplace (George & Brief, 1992). So positive leaders tend to take followers’ ideas or requirements into consideration and try to optimize followers’ work conditions or help them find solutions to challenges while negative leaders, unwilling to be bothered by the additional workload from followers, tend to be indifferent to followers, reject their requirements or even criticize their incompetency. What’s more, according to the broaden–and–build theory of positive emotions (Fredrickson, 2001), positive emotions broaden an individual's momentary thought–action repertoire and promote discovery of creative actions and ideas. Consequently, more help (instrumental or informational support) will be available when a team member encounters problems and turns to an engaged leader.

Second, leaders with higher work engagement have more organizational commitment and tend to support followers to achieve the team goal and contribute to the organizational development. With a strong attachment to the team and organization and an intense desire to boost the team performance, engaged leaders will follow up the work process, provide performance feedback (appraisal support) and offer additional resources (instrumental or informational support) which they think are necessary to improve the efficiency or overcome the difficulties in work. Furthermore, to motivate the followers to contribute fully, engaged leaders will show concern to them and reward the followers with excellent performance. As signs that leaders value the contribution of followers, both the concern and rewards can enhance followers’ perceived supervisor support.

Besides, as work engagement has been shown to positively relate to organizational citizenship behavior (Halbesleben et al. 2009), leaders in higher degree of work engagement may conduct more helping behaviors in team, which can enhance followers’ trust and perceived supervisor support. It is found that behaviorally engaged employees are likely to spend more time in work–related issues and doing things not technically required (Macey & Schneider, 2008). From this perspective, engaged leaders will show more altruism behaviors, such as providing individual consideration for followers, listening to followers’ worries and complaints, and assisting followers finish their own tasks, which will lead to followers’ higher perceived supervisor support.

Finally, conservation of resources theory (COR, Hobfoll, 2001) can also help explain the influence of Leader’s work engagement has on follower’s perceived supervisor support. One fundamental of COR theory is that individuals seek to create a world that will help them retain, protect, and build resources and provide them with pleasure and success. People will invest the resources they have in order to protect against resource loss, recover from losses, and gain more resources. Considering the fact that leaders’ time and energy are limited and leaders’ responsibility is to lead the team to achieve the goal, we can predict that leaders will allocate the additional resources they have to followers and provide application guide and advice to make full use of the resources and obtain more other resources. Engaged leaders not only initiatively seek for job resources (e.g. social support, performance feedback, learning opportunities) from their supervisors but also create resources by themselves. In this way, highly engaged leaders have more resources to offer to their followers than lowly engaged leaders. Hence, followers who work with leaders in higher degree of work engagement will perceive more supervisor support.

Given the above four perspectives together, we can predict that team leader’s work engagement will be positively associated with follower’s perceived supervisor support.

Hypothesis 2: Team leader’s work engagement has a positive relationship with follower’s perceived supervisor support.

Follower’s perceived supervisor support and work engagement

The Job Demands–Resources (JD–R) model (Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, & Schaufeli, 2001) is an overarching model that explains how job burnout and work engagement may be caused by job demands and job resources, which are two working conditions found in organizational context. Job demands refer to the requirement of physical and psychological efforts and are associated with certain costs (Demerouti, 2001). High job demands, which require too much effort from which employees cannot be adequately recovered, may become job stressors. Job resources are referred as the physical, social, or organizational aspects of the job that are: "functional in achieving work goals; reduce job demands and the associated physiological and psychological costs; stimulate personal growth, learning, and development" (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007, p.4).

Job resources not only offset the stress from job demands but also have values in their own right (Bakker, Demerouti, & Euwema, 2005; Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). Job resources play both intrinsic and extrinsic roles in fostering work engagement because job resources contribute to employees’ growth, learning and development or provide instrumental assets to achieve work goals (Bakker, Schaufeli, Leiter, & Taris, 2008).

One of the important job resources is social support from supervisor or co–workers (Bakker et al., 2008). Here we just take supervisor support into consideration. Supervisor support has intrinsic and extrinsic motivational potential in stirring up follower work engagement due to the reasons below.

Emotional support from the team leader can facilitate followers’ sense of belonging, and attachment to the team and even the whole organization. Followers with higher organizational commitment will be willing to put in a large amount of effort beyond normally required to help reach the collective goal. What’s more, emotional support can boost followers’ trust in leaders and increase their psychological safety (Kahn, 1990; May et al., 2004), a feeling of being able to show and employ the self with no negative impacts on self–image, status and career (Kahn, 1990).

Functional in reaching the work goal, instrumental support and informational support from leaders mainly play a significant extrinsic motivational role in improving followers’ work engagement. Instrumental and informational support may also have intrinsic motivational potential because that both of them increase the possibility of success and foster higher self-efficacy and collective efficacy which are personal resources positively associated with goal self-concordance (Judge, Bono, Erez, & Locke, 2005). Individuals with goal self–concordance are intrinsically motivated to pursue their goals (Luthans & Youssef, 2007) and willing to dedicate one’s efforts and abilities to work.

Finally, appraisal support from leaders can help followers know their strengths and weaknesses in work and know how to perform better in the future. With appraisal support, followers have a clear understanding of themselves and their work and thus they can better concentrate on work and invest more efforts to do better.

To sum up, when followers perceive more supervisor support, they tend to be more engaged in work.

The positive relationship between perceived supervisor support and work engagement can also be interpreted by the Social Exchange Theory (SET; Blau, 1964). Referring to SET, when one person does another a favor, there is an expectation of some future return. The generalized norm of reciprocity Gouldner’s (1960) suggests that obligations are created toward another when a party has conducted previous behavior beneficial to the recipient. When leaders constantly provide work-related support for followers, followers will feel it obligated to pay back. One way to repay the leader and the organization is to be more engrossed in work. When leaders fail to provide support and resources, followers are more likely to lose enthusiasm and disengage themselves from work roles. As a result, the degree to which workers are engaged depends on the support from leaders, which is consistent with Robinson et al.'s (2004) statement that engagement is a two-way relationship between the employer and employees.

Empirical support for the positive relationship between perceived supervisor support and work engagement have been demonstrated in some studies (Sze, 2011; Bakker et al., 2007; Schaufeli et al., 2009). Bakker et al. (2007) demonstrated the significant and positive relationship between supervisor support and vigor, dedication, and absorption respectively among Finnish teachers. A study of middle managers and executives of a Dutch company by Schaufeli et al. (2009) also found the same conclusion.

Based on the theoretical analysis and the existing empirical support, we put forward the third hypothesis that follower’s perceived supervisor support has a positive relationship with their work engagement.

Hypothesis 3: Followers’ perceived supervisor support has a positive relationship with their work engagement.

The mediation of follower’s perceived supervisor support in the top-down crossover

With positive emotion, highly commitment to the organization goal, proactive attitude, engaged team leaders have the abilities and motives to provide followers with support. They not only offer tangible resources which can help finish the tasks but also take followers’ personal development and psychological needs into consideration and enhance followers’ attachment to the leaders and the team. As a result, followers tend to perceive more supervisor support under the charge of leaders with higher work engagement. With adequate supervisor support, followers feel it safe and meaningful to assume the core job roles as well as the non-core roles. What’s more, resources are available for the followers to fully release their potential. Therefore, individuals who perceive more supervisor support are more likely to be engaged in work to sense of the significance of the work and pay back the leaders. The above analysis leads us to formulate our fourth and the final hypothesis:

Hypothesis 4: Follower’s perceived supervisor support mediates top-down crossover of work engagement from team leaders to followers.