It's lonely at the bottom (too): The effects of experienced powerlessness on social closeness and disengagement

Foulk, Trevor; Pater, Irene E. De; Schaerer, Michael; Plessis, Christilene du; Lee, Randy; Erez, Amir

doi:10.1111/peps.12358

Cited by 33 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 128 publications

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“…Negative affect (NA). NA was measured at the beginning and at the end of each workday with a shortened version of the PANAS (five items) validated by MacKinnon et al (1999) and often used in ESM studies (e.g., Foulk et al, 2020;Matta, Scott, Guo, & Matusik, 2020). Participants utilized a 5-point scale to indicate the extent to which they were experiencing each emotion "right now" (1 ϭ not at all and 5 ϭ a great deal).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does CWB repair negative affective states, or generate them? Examining the moderating role of trait empathy.

Koopman¹,

Conway²,

Dimotakis³

et al. 2021

Journal of Applied Psychology

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Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is a topic of considerable importance for organizational scholars and practitioners. Yet, despite a wide-ranging consensus that negative affect (NA) is a precursor to CWB, there is surprisingly little consensus as to whether CWB enactment will subsequently lead to lower or higher levels of NA. That is, scholars disagree as to whether CWB has a reparative (negative) or generative (positive) effect on subsequent NA. We submit that both perspectives have validity, and thus the question should not be whether CWB is associated with lower or higher subsequent levels of NA, but rather for whom. This article is dedicated to answering this question. Drawing from the behavioral concordance model, we position empathy as a moderator of this relationship, such that CWB will be reparative for those with lower levels of empathy and generative for those with higher levels of empathy. Findings across 3 experience-sampling studies support our hypotheses and highlight a number of interesting directions for future research.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does CWB repair negative affective states, or generate them? Examining the moderating role of trait empathy.

Koopman¹,

Conway²,

Dimotakis³

et al. 2021

Journal of Applied Psychology

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“…Therefore, we hypothesize that individuals experiencing loneliness should engage more in social interactions through social media [28], and should be less concerned about social distancing, reporting lower levels with regard to safety-related behaviors. Moreover, loneliness is an assumed predictor for behavioral disengagement [29]. Thus, people experiencing loneliness might be less motivated to pursue personal projects [30].…”

Section: Defensive Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

From anxiety to action—Experience of threat, emotional states, reactance, and action preferences in the early days of COVID-19 self-isolation in Germany and Austria

et al. 2020

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The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted everyday life virtually everywhere in the world, enabling real-life research on threat-and-defense processes. In a survey conducted within the first days of implementing social distancing measures in Austria and Germany, we aimed to explore the pathways from threat perception to preferences of defense strategies. We found that anxiety, approach-related affect, and reactance were specifically elicited by motivational (vs. epistemic) discrepancies. In a second step, we tested the mediating effect of anxiety, approach-related affect, and reactance on preferences regarding personal-social and concrete-abstract defenses. Experiencing anxiety was related to interest in security-related actions, and approach-affect was related to both personal projects and social media use. Participants experiencing reactance were more inclined to pursue personal projects (personal-abstract) and less interested in security-related (personal-concrete) actions. They also showed marginally lower system justification (social-abstract). Additionally, we examined the relationship of loneliness with defense strategies, showing that loneliness was associated with lower system justification and security behaviors. The results suggest that individuals deal with threat in their own ways, mostly depending on affective state and motivational orientation: Anxiety was related to security, approach-state to action (both social and personal), reactance to derogation of the system and disregard for security, while loneliness was associated with inaction.

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“…Instead, middle-power conditions are more appropriate, because “middle-power conditions generally provide a more conservative test of a power effect” (p. 86). Therefore, aligned with this recommendation, as well as with recent work using a design similar to ours (Foulk, De Pater, et al, 2020), we used a middle-power condition as our control condition.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

With great power comes more job demands: The dynamic effects of experienced power on perceived job demands and their discordant effects on employee outcomes.

Foulk¹,

Lanaj²

2022

Journal of Applied Psychology

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In this work, we consider the complex and discordant effects that psychological power has on powerholders. To do so, we integrate the situated focus theory of power, which identifies perceptions of job demands as a key outcome of power, with new insights from the challenge-hindrance framework, which acknowledges that job demands may both help and hurt employees. Our model delineates how power-induced job demands may simultaneously benefit (manifested as goal progress and meaningfulness) and harm (manifested as physical discomfort and anxiety) powerholders. By identifying job demands as a key mediator we provide an integrative account of the nuanced effects that power has on powerholders. Additionally, we show that the relationship between feeling powerful and perceiving one's job to be demanding is stronger for employees higher (vs. lower) in neuroticism. We tested our theoretical model in two studies-a field experiment where we tested the full model, and a second experiment where we conceptually replicated the effect of power on perceived job demands. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our work.

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It's lonely at the bottom (too): The effects of experienced powerlessness on social closeness and disengagement

Cited by 33 publications

References 128 publications

Does CWB repair negative affective states, or generate them? Examining the moderating role of trait empathy.

Does CWB repair negative affective states, or generate them? Examining the moderating role of trait empathy.

From anxiety to action—Experience of threat, emotional states, reactance, and action preferences in the early days of COVID-19 self-isolation in Germany and Austria

With great power comes more job demands: The dynamic effects of experienced power on perceived job demands and their discordant effects on employee outcomes.

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