Doing good buffers against feeling bad: Prosocial impact compensates for negative task and self-evaluations

Although evidence suggests that negative task and self-evaluations are associated with emotional exhaustion, little research has examined factors that buffer against these effects. We propose that perceived prosocial impact, the experience of helping others, compensates for negative task and self-evaluations by focusing attention on positive outcomes for others. In Study 1, perceived prosocial impact attenuated the associations of low intrinsic motivation and core self-evaluations with emotional exhaustion among professional fundraisers. Study 2 replicated these results among public sanitation employees and extended them to supervisor performance ratings. Mediated moderation analyses indicated that by protecting against emotional exhaustion, perceived prosocial impact compensated for low intrinsic motivation and core self-evaluations to predict higher performance ratings. Our studies extend theory and research on burnout, helping, and citizenship. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Emotional exhaustion, the hallmark of burnout, is a pervasive problem for organizations (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001). When employees become emotionally exhausted, they show declines in job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and customer service (Cropanzano, Rupp, & Byrne, 2003; Halbesleben & Buckley, 2004; Taris, 2006), as well as increases in absenteeism and turnover (Firth & Britton, 1989) and increased physical health risks (Melamed, Shirom, Toker, Berliner, & Shapira, 2006). Traditionally, researchers focused heavily on the role of environmental, organizational, and situational factors in causing emotional exhaustion in service work (Halbesleben & Buckley, 2004). More recently, scholars have shown growing interest in understanding how employees’ subjective perceptions and evaluations at work are likely to influence their feelings of emotional exhaustion in a wide range of occupations, including human services, education, clerical work, computer programming, and military and managerial roles (Halbesleben & Buckley, 2004; Maslach et al., 2001). There is now considerable evidence that how employees evaluate their tasks and themselves has an important influence on emotional exhaustion (e.g., Best, Stapleton, & Downey, 2005; Morrison, Payne, & Wall, 2003). From a self-regulation perspective, negative task and self-evaluations are thought to breed emotional exhaustion by depleting employees’ psychological resources (Hobfoll, 2002). When employees evaluate their tasks and themselves negatively, they tend to dwell on unpleasant aspects of work, which consumes psychological resources, reducing their energy levels and making it more exhausting to invest time and effort in their work (Fritz & Sonnentag, 2006). Although a number of studies have traced emotional exhaustion to negative task and self-evaluations, little theory and research exists to explain what factors buffer against the detrimental impact of these negative task and self-evaluations on emotional exhaustion. This is a theoretically and practically important problem given that researchers have generated more knowledge relevant to understanding the causes of exhaustion than the full range of factors that prevent and buffer against it (Halbesleben & Buckley, 2004). We address this issue by drawing on theories of self-regulation to propose that perceived prosocial impact, the experience of helping others (Grant, 2007), protects against the emotional exhaustion precipitated by negative task and self-evaluations. By focusing employees’ attention on how their actions facilitate positive outcomes for others, perceived prosocial impact may reduce the likelihood that they will dwell on their negative task and selfevaluations, protecting against emotional exhaustion. We further predict that by buffering against emotional exhaustion, perceived prosocial impact enables employees to maintain their job performance. Across field studies of professional fundraisers and public sanitation employees, we find support for our buffering hypotheses that perceived prosocial impact compensates for negative task and self-evaluations, and thus protects against decreased job performance. Our research contributes to the literatures on helping, citizenship, affect, and burnout at work. 0749-5978/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.07.003 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 215 746 2529; fax: +1 215 898 0401. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A.M. Grant), sabine.sonnentag@ uni-konstanz.de (S. Sonnentag). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 111 (2010) 13–22