Thriving on Virtue or Vice? Interpersonal Citizenship and Incivility as Restorative Mechanisms for Daily Goal-Related Self-Esteem and Emotional Impairment

Employees are often required to bounce back promptly from poor goal progress in their daily work to maintain work efficiency for the rest of the day, hence it is helpful to shed light on mechanisms that can help employees better regulate their goal-related self-esteem and emotions during work hours. Based on the notion that recovery opportunities exist alongside employees' interactions with their coworkers, I proposed that the performance of prosocial and antisocial interpersonal behaviors could both serve restorative functions for employees' self-esteem and emotions in the workday, albeit under different boundary conditions. I first contended that employees' daily goal progress would be positively related to their state self-esteem, especially on days when they perceived higher control over their goal progress. Next, based on the theories of self-consistency and interpersonal motives, I expected affiliation and dominance motives to act as first-stage moderators that interact with low state self-esteem to predict employees' enactment of interpersonal citizenship behaviors and incivility respectively during the workday. The same motives were also expected to function as second-stage moderators to qualify the respective positive relations from interpersonal citizenship and incivility to employees' end-of-day self-esteem. For emotions, I hypothesized goal progress to be negatively related to both midday anger and shame, but each to a different extent depending on employees' perceived personal control over their daily goal progress. Next, I expected midday shame to positively predict interpersonal helping while midday anger to positively predict incivility enactment. In turn, the performance of these respective interpersonal behaviors would be negatively related to end-of-day shame and anger. Finally, I argued that both self-esteem recovery and emotional recovery would be positively related to goal progress for the second half of the workday. I collected data twice a day for ten workdays from 111 full-time employees to test this model. The results from 786 matched daily data points demonstrated daily goal progress to be positively related to midday self-esteem and negatively related to midday shame and anger. Perceived control was a significant moderator only for the goal progress -- anger relation, such that it was less negative on days when there were higher (vs. lower) levels of perceived control. For self-esteem, the results revealed some unexpected but interesting differences between explicit esteem and implicit esteem in terms of their relations with the enactment of interpersonal citizenship and incivility. For emotions, midday shame did not predict citizenship behaviors, but performing more citizenship behaviors was related to lower end-of-day shame. Midday anger positively predicted the enactment of incivility, but enacting more incivility was not significantly related to lower end-of-day anger. Finally, esteem recovery and emotional recovery were related to better goal progress for the second half of the day. I discussed the theoretical and practical implications of these findings, before noting their limitations and proposing directions for future research.