Social support at work and at home: Dual-buffering effects in the work-family conflict process

Using experience-sampling methodology, the present study offers a within-individual test of the buffering model of social support in the daily work-family conflict process. Building on the conceptualization of social support as a volatile resource, we examine how daily fluctuations in social support at work and at home influence the process through which work interferes with family life. A total of 112 employees participated in the study and were asked to respond to daily surveys in the work and home domains. Results showed that social support at work and at home—as volatile resources—buffered the daily work-family conflict process within their respective domains. First, a supportive supervisor mitigated the within-individual effect of workload on emotional exhaustion. Second, a supportive spouse protected the strained employee from the effect of emotional exhaustion on work-family conflict, and spousal support also moderated the indirect effect from workload to work-family conflict through emotional exhaustion. The findings suggest that enacting a dual social support system can effectively reduce the adverse effects of excessive job demands on exhaustion and work-family conflict, but buffering effects are highly dependent on the timely availability of social support

Free to move or trapped in your group: Mathematical modeling of information overload and coordination in crowded populations

We present modeling strategies that describe the motion and interaction of groups of pedestrians in obscured spaces. We start off with an approach based on balance equations in terms of measures and then we exploit the descriptive power of a probabilistic cellular automaton model. Based on a variation of the simple symmetric random walk on the square lattice, we test the interplay between population size and an interpersonal attraction parameter for the evacuation of confined and darkened spaces. We argue that information overload and coordination costs associated with information processing in small groups are two key processes that influence the evacuation rate. Our results show that substantial computational resources are necessary to compensate for incomplete information -- the more individuals in (information processing) groups the higher the exit rate for low population size. For simple social systems, it is likely that the individual representations are not redundant and large group sizes ensure that this non--redundant information is actually available to a substantial number of individuals. For complex social systems information redundancy makes information evaluation and transfer inefficient and, as such, group size becomes a drawback rather than a benefit. The effect of group sizes on outgoing fluxes, evacuation times and wall effects are carefully studied with a Monte Carlo framework accounting also for the presence of an internal obstacle

Does conflict shatter trust or does trust obliterate conflict? Revisiting the relationships between team diversity, conflict, and trust

This article explores the interplay between trust and conflict as antecedents of team effectiveness. In the first cross-sectional study, two alternative path models are tested in a sample of 174 teams (897 participants) with the emergent states of task conflict, relationship conflict, and trust acting as mediators between team demographic diversity (gender and nationality) on the one hand and perceived team effectiveness on the other. In one model trust is considered as an antecedent for the two types of conflict, while in the other the two types of conflict precede the emergence of trust. Although the fit indices for the model in which trust is considered the antecedent of conflict were slightly better, both models fitted the data well. The interdependence of trust and conflict was further explored in a second longitudinal study (49 teams), and the results showed that trust emerging in the initial team interaction phases is a good predictor for the emergence of both task and relationship conflict in further stages of team development

I will follow (when I need to) Followers' responses to their team leader's desire for control in conditions of high and low intergroup competition

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate if the personality trait of desire for control over others (DFCO) matters to team leadership and performance, and how commitment to the leader mediates this relationship. Furthermore, the authors study whether intergroup competition moderates this indirect relationship. Design/methodology/approach - The authors test hypotheses for mediation and moderation using a sample of 78 groups and their leaders. Commitment to the leader and intergroup competition were measured at the team member level, while DFCO and team performance was rated by the team leader. Bootstrapping was used to assess the significance of the ( conditional) indirect effects. Findings - The results show that leader's DFCO does not relate to team performance through commitment to the leader. Leader's DFCO only relates negatively to team performance through commitment to the leader when the team operates in a context with little or moderate intergroup competition. In a highly competitive environment, however, leader's DFCO does little damage to team performance. Originality/value - This research is the first study to focus on DFCO as a personality trait of a group leader. In doing so, it adds to the continuing debate about leader personality and context, as well as the ongoing study on how subordinates respond to different levels of control over decisions in groups