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Employee And Coworker Idiosyncratic Deals: Implications For Emotional Exhaustion And Deviant Behaviors, Dejun Tony Kong, Violet T. Ho, Sargam Garg

Management Faculty Publications

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 …