Continually juggling stakeholders can lead to doubting the value of your mission

If your work has taken you into meetings with a partnering company, a cross-institutional committee, or any situation working together with another organisation, you've taken the role of a boundary spanner. Organisations do well out of boundary spanners, who deliver them information about external conditions and increase their reach to broader stakeholders. But Lakshmi Ramarajan and colleagues have demonstrated that there are costs for the boundary spanner, particularly in challenging, multi-party situations.

Social psychology suggests that contact across group boundaries is problematic outside of ideal circumstances. Disparate goals may fuel conflict; unfamiliar patterns of behaviour can be hard to adjust to; outside perspective may cast your own organisation in an unfavourable light. To investigate this, Ramarajan's team surveyed 833 Dutch military personnel, who spent time between 1995 and 1999 engaged in peacekeeping missions. Such missions occur against a backdrop of heavy conflict, and are made more problematic by status and resource differences between the peacekeepers and their non-military counterparts: NGO's, governmental bodies and local authorities.

Each participant detailed their frequency of personal contact with each type of party, and the degree of seriousness of work-specific problems that emerged with that party – a combination of objective severity and their personal involvement. Their responses confirmed that peacekeepers with more frequent contact with other parties had greater experiences of work-specific problems.

Previous research has suggested an inverse relationship between conditions 'home' and 'away', as if a spat with an external partner makes you more grateful for your colleagues. But in the current study, more work-specific problems with other parties led to more negative attitudes towards their own job and doubting the value of their mission. This resembles spillover from one domain to another, due to ruminations or drained psychological resources. The authors attribute the difference to the high demands on peacekeepers, juggling many parties on non-facilitated, difficult issues without the option to walk away, a situation increasingly common for more and more 21st Century organisations.

Boundary spanning activities are certainly useful to the organisation, and can benefit the individual, who tends to be more trusted and gain reputation with other organisations. But we should be concerned with its costs, eroding engagement with the work and faith in the organisation, which are especially likely in complex situations with soft organisational boundaries. As the authors conclude, those in this position may want to weigh these issues up “when thinking about the costs of alliances, joint ventures, or other cooperative mechanisms.”

Ramarajan, L., Bezrukova, K., Jehn, K., & Euwema, M. (2011). From the outside in: The negative spillover effects of boundary spanners' relations with members of other organizations Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (6), 886-905 DOI: 10.1002/job.723

Hey co-worker, your family stresses affect me, too

Kim is a little worried about her co-worker Greg. She hears all about his home issues: young kids, ill mother, and a house sale turned ugly.

You hear that his mammoth project has been stuttering recently - unsurprising.

It seems to have affected Kim a little too...

wonder how she is finding work right now?

Greg is experiencing family-work interference (FWI), where an individual struggles in the workplace, home, or in both domains, due to the conflicting demands they make. These include time demands and stresses, together with required behaviours - a workplace may expect an objective and cool style, whereas a family wants your openness and warmth. We vary in how we experience this: men are most likely to perceive the problem as family obstructing their work, rather than the reverse, and ‘Type-A’ traits are associated with more FWI. All in all, though, these clashes cause problems.

Now a new study by Lieke ten Brummelhuis and colleagues suggests that an employee’s levels of FWI affects not just themselves, but their co-workers too. They studied 1,430 pairs of employees from a Dutch policing organisation, and measured whether the FWI of one employee correlated with more sick days and stronger intention to leave the organisation for both members of the pair. They discovered it did: higher FWI produced worse outcomes on both measures for the employee themselves, and somewhat more weakly for their co-worker as well.

The team provide evidence that the negative outcomes are due to the transmission of emotional states from one co-worker to the other, a process called crossover. They measured states commonly associated with FWI: burnout, where exhaustion and doubts stack up to make daily responsibilities a struggle, and low levels of engagement, an attunement with your job, organisation, profession. The study showed that both crossed-over, and also showed that each appears to have a distinct effect. Burnout was more likely to lead to sick days, whereas lack of engagement, by eroding loyalty, increases intention to leave.

How the feelings caused by FWI cross-over isn’t fully understood. It’s likely to be a combination of negative banter, atmosphere, and displaced tasks from the overloaded employee. As such, it's premature on the basis of this research to recommend how to reduce the cross-over; some may be due to too much sharing between colleagues and some due to too little. But we can clearly see the benefit in seeking to reduce FWI for each and every employee, as the consequences can be far spreading. When Greg is feeling the strain, Kim may be feeling it, too.

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Ten Brummelhuis, L.L., Bakker, A.B., Euwema, M.C. (2010). Is family-to-work interference related to co-workers' work outcomes? Journal of Vocational Behavior, 77(3), 461-469, DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2010.06.001