It’s Not Always Sunny in Relationally Rich Jobs: The Influence of Negative Beneficiary Contact

Abstract

Contact with beneficiaries has been described as an important job characteristic for shaping perceptions about the meaning of work; however, little is known about the role of negative beneficiary contact. We draw from two tenets of social information processing theory to propose that negative contact with beneficiaries has a dual effect on employees. Whereas negative contact may make employees perceive low social worth, it may simultaneously lead employees to believe they are engaging in self-sacrifice for a worthy cause—a relatively positive justification of such experiences. We investigated these ideas in three studies. In Study 1, a three-wave survey of registered nurses and their supervisors supported the hypothesized dual effect. Further consistent with our theorizing, the effect of perceived self-sacrifice on job satisfaction and performance was contingent on co-worker emotional support: at higher levels of support, perceived self-sacrifice exhibited a null relationship with satisfaction and a positive relationship with performance, whereas at lower levels of support these effects were negative. In Study 2, we again studied nurses using an experimental vignette method, showing that negative contact exhibits a causal effect on employee perceptions, and that negative contact is more likely to lead to perceived self-sacrifice when the contact is attributed to the nature of the work as opposed to one’s own performance. In Study 3, a two-wave survey of people from various occupations replicated the effects of negative contact on perceived social worth and perceived self-sacrifice. Moreover, the effect of negative contact on sacrifice was contingent on affective commitment to beneficiaries.