Employee and Coworker Idiosyncratic Deals: Implications for Emotional Exhaustion and Deviant Behaviors

Dejun Tony Kong (), Violet T. Ho () and Sargam Garg ()
Additional contact information
Dejun Tony Kong: University of Houston
Violet T. Ho: University of Richmond
Sargam Garg: California State University, Sacramento

Journal of Business Ethics, 2020, vol. 164, issue 3, No 11, 593-609

Abstract: Abstract By integrating conservation of resources and social comparison perspectives, we seek to investigate how employees’ own i-deals, independently from and jointly with their coworker’s i-deals, determine their emotional exhaustion and subsequent deviant behaviors. We conducted a field study (131 coworker dyads) focusing on task i-deals, and used Actor–Partner Interdependence Model and polynomial regression to test the hypotheses. We found that emotional exhaustion not only mediated the negative relationship between employees’ own task i-deals and deviant behaviors, but also mediated the positive relationship between upward social comparison of task i-deals (i.e., a coworker’s vs own task i-deals) and deviant behaviors. These results demonstrated the intra- and interpersonal implications of task i-deals for emotional exhaustion and subsequent deviant behaviors. The current research not only shifts the attention from a predominantly positive view on i-deals to a more balanced and nuanced view on i-deals’ implications, but also sheds light on the interpersonal nature of i-deals and the emotional exhaustion implication of upward social comparison.

Keywords: Idiosyncratic deals; Emotional exhaustion; Social comparison; Coworker; Deviant behaviors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-018-4033-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:164:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s10551-018-4033-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-018-4033-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().