Supporting Others Through Stressful Organizational Change

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to explore the nature of support given to staff undergoing stressful organizational change and to determine the forms, antecedents, targets, and consequences of this support. Interviews in a wider study of changes in a New Zealand public health care authority produced the surprising finding that although 31 participants were asked about receiving support, 17 volunteered information on giving support to others. Various forms of support were given to different targets for various reasons and produced positive and negative outcomes for those providing support. Given that studies focusing on offering support during organizational change are extremely rare, our article, and the model it contains, makes a contribution to the literature on change, well-being, and support. The implications for practice are that organizations need to be aware of change’s potentially stressful impacts and make an extra effort to provide support without draining the resources of its employees.

Keywords

helping OCB organizational change qualitative stress support

Introduction

Support for others is woven into the fabric of organizational life in multiple relationships, exchanges, and contexts (Colbert, Bono, & Purvanova, 2016; Morrison, 2009). Accessing support helps in coping during times of stress, and since organizational change can be stressful in terms of processes and outcomes, it is one context where support from others becomes particularly meaningful (Cunningham et al., 2002; Lawrence & Callan, 2011; Robinson & Griffiths, 2005). Work stress is a negative psychological state where the job demands are appraised as outweighing the available resources needed to meet them (Folkman, Lazarus, Dunkel-Schetter, DeLongis, & Gruen, 1986; Karasek et al., 1998) with support being a valuable resource in coping with stress (Folkman et al., 1986; Hobfoll, 2001). Instrumental or tangible support may reduce workloads or the burden of difficult tasks, while emotional support signals to the receivers that they not alone and has psychological value in the reduction of negative emotions, the gaining or regaining of self-confidence, and the enhancement of well-being (Fugate, Kinicki, & Scheck, 2002; House, 1981).

Change is often accompanied by uncertainty (Bordia, Hobman, Jones, Gallois, & Callan, 2004), can create extra workloads in the transition and aftermath, and can lead to a sense of loss (Robinson & Griffiths, 2005). Support may thereby also enhance adaptation to change. A wealth of research in organizational settings has focused on support from supervisors, colleagues, the organization as a whole, and from outside sources, such as partners, families, and friends (e.g., Fugate et al., 2002; Morrison, 2009; Thomas & Lankau, 2010). While receiving support has been extensively investigated, less well-researched are the reasons support is offered, or not offered, to others, why it may be offered to some employees but not others, why some forms of support are provided, and what the intended and unintended benefits and costs may be to the giver. Organizational change is one context where support has been studied (e.g., Fugate et al., 2002; Lawrence & Callan, 2011), but seldom has this focused on those giving support.

This article stems from a wider study of stressful organizational change in which interviews were conducted with employees of a public health care provider in New Zealand. The focus was on the causes and consequences of stress before, during, and after organizational change and on the coping strategies the participants employed. Participants were asked whether they had received support, but not whether they had offered or given support. Despite this, more than half of them (17/31) volunteered information on the support they gave to others, indicating that this was a salient aspect of organizational change for them. Derived from the transcripts and the literature, the following research questions were formulated for this article: What forms of support were provided to others to help them cope with stressful organizational change, to whom were they offered, why were they offered, and what were the outcomes for the giver? An intriguing additional question is why participants chose to talk about supporting others in an interview designed to explore their experiences of how they managed their own change-related stress.

The article begins with a literature review on the nature and targets of support, the antecedents of giving support, particularly in stressful organizational circumstances, and the consequences for the giver. The Method section provides insight into the nature of abductive research, who the participants were, and how the data on giving support emerged. The findings and discussion analyze responses in term of the organizational relationship between the giver and the receiver, the forms of support provided, the givers’ motives, and the outcomes for them. We contribute to the literature by exploring an underresearched facet of organizational life, particularly the motives for offering support, and by providing a model of support given to others through different phases of stressful organizational change.

Literature Review

A number of theoretical frameworks guide research into giving workplace support, using terms such as helping (Doyle, Lount, Wilk, & Pettit, 2016), giving (Strazdins & Broom, 2007), prosocial behavior (Knoche & Waples, 2016), compassion (Dutton, Workman, & Hardin, 2014), and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs; Koopman, Lanaj, & Scott, 2016).

Types of Support

Workplace support can take many forms. House (1981) identifies four categories. Instrumental support has a task focus, which could involve the giver doing some of the work, providing training, or allocating additional resources, such as funding, staffing, or access to others. Emotional support provides the receivers with an opportunity to discuss their problems with an empathetic or sympathetic ear and, in unburdening themselves, have their concerns validated. Informational support gives the receiver advice and guidance on how to address a problem. Appraisal support provides a sounding board and feedback on issues recipients raise.

Lundqvist, Erikson, and Ekberg (2018) extended House’s framework to seven types. They compared their categories, derived from interviews with managers on why they had accessed support (or chosen not to), with those of House (1981). Information and discussion correspond to House’s informational support, ventilation (the term the authors use for talking about stress to others) and social belonging are forms of emotional support, practical assistance equates to instrumental support, feedback is a form of appraisal, and the last, confidence (giving people faith in their own abilities), is a category they note is not in House’s framework. Different perspectives on types of support are provided by Russell, Altmaier, and van Velzen (1987), who used the six-item Social Provision Scale in a study of teacher stress and burnout: attachment, social integration, reassurance of worth, guidance, reliable alliance, and nurturance; and by Drach-Zahavy (2004), who identified four support behaviors in her study of nurses: helping, maintenance, referral, and encouragement of self-coping.

House’s (1981) work appears to be the most widely cited in empirical studies on support in organizational change (e.g., Fugate et al., 2002; Lysaght & Larmour-Trode, 2008; Swanson & Power, 2001), at least regarding instrumental and emotional support. These two are usually treated as distinct types, but the relationships between them are often ignored. For example, when instrumental support is offered, it may also be constructed by the receiver and/or the giver as implicit emotional support, if the two are not explicitly offered. House’s (1981) other forms of support, informational and appraisal, may be deliberately offered together with the others, depending on the context.

Targets of Support

Workplace support can be provided by various sources, including supervisors, mentors, colleagues, and even the organization itself (Thomas & Lankau, 2009). Perceived organizational support (POS) is an employee belief that the organization cares about its staff and will support them when necessary (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986). Supervisory support is a personal manifestation of POS (Shanock & Eisenberger, 2006), and supervisors are reported to be particularly influential in determining the well-being and performance of their staff (Fugate et al., 2002). Collegial support, when welcomed by co-workers (Lawrence & Callan, 2011; Lundqvist et al., 2018), provides a sound foundation for many work relationships (Morrison, 2009). Interestingly, the support provided by subordinates to their supervisors seldom appears in academic studies.

Antecedents of Giving Support

Factors that may influence whether or not an individual will offer support have been found to relate to individual differences as well as dyadic, group, and wider organizational relationships. Research into the motives for workplace support has emerged from multiple streams, particularly those using social exchange theories, such as leader–member exchange (LMX), organizational citizenship behavior, and POS, as well as literature on compassion, disposition, values, and identity.

LMX theory is about dyadic supervisor–member relations and maintains that support offered by supervisors tends to create closer ties, less employee stress, and better performance. Thomas and Lankau (2009) found in a hospital-based study of subordinates that strong LMX relationships, particularly where leaders provided social support, reduced role stress and burnout. Yet LMX may also impose a burden of responsibility on the supervisor to support a subordinate for reasons related to compassion and/or efficiency (Drach-Zahavy, 2004).

OCB differs from LMX in that it concerns discretionary actions underpinned by altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, civic virtue, and sportsmanship (Organ, 1997; Organ, Podsakoff, & MacKenzie, 2006). It is usually directed at individuals, but the giver of support may also have the interests of a group or the organization in mind, and it is more likely to derive from altruism (Bommer, Dierdorff, & Rubin, 2007). While the value to the individual receivers of OCB, usually in the form of instrumental and/or emotional support, is often beneficial (Koopman et al., 2016), less is known about the consequences for the givers and the motives they have for rendering it (Takeuchi, Bolino, & Lin, 2015). Kim, van Dyne, Kamdar, and Johnson (2013) found that in addition to the motives of concern for the individual receiver and for the organization, concern for self, through the expected rewards of impression management, also drives some support behavior. Favors may be reciprocated (Halbesleben & Wheeler, 2011) or the impression of being a good citizen could advance one’s career prospects and status (Doyle et al., 2016).

POS is the employee’s global belief that the organization is concerned for his or her well-being and will provide support to enhance it (Eisenberger et al., 1986). In addition, when supervisors feel supported by their organizations, they tend to support their own staff and increase their in-role and extra-role performance (Shanock & Eisenberger, 2006).

Identity research reveals several types of identity and how these contribute to the likelihood of an individual supporting others, instrumentally, emotionally, or in some other way. Stets and Burke (2014) describe three facets of identity: first, personal identity, a sense of self that encompasses a set of values; second, role identity, reflecting the expectations that others have; and third, social identity, the meaning people attach to being members of a group. Other scholars (e.g., Sillince & Galant, 2018) have identified a fourth type, organizational identity, which is an extension of social identity to the employer. These constructs will manifest in the context of social support at work, such that helping others may be a value contributing to personal identity (Stoner, Perrewé, &. Munyon, 2011), while adhering to expectations of benevolence toward others in one’s job will relate to role identity. The earlier construction of OCB as extra-role in nature (Organ, 1997; Organ et al., 2006) has been challenged, in that support for others may be perceived by the givers as an implicit or explicit expectation of their roles (Kim et al., 2013). The motives for this interpretation of behavior are therefore different to people with a more altruistic orientation, who may be behaving in accordance with their identity rather than with some other motive. Social identity has been found to underpin support behaviors, particularly with respect to those based on nationality, religion, gender, and profession (Blader & Tyler, 2009; Haslam, Jetten, Postmes, & Haslam, 2009). Organizational identification also elicits support behaviors, particularly when givers of support have themselves received support (Shanock & Eisenberger, 2006; Sillince & Galant, 2018).

Disposition, personality, and values have also been cited as antecedents of a variety of support behaviors. For example, Finkelstein (2006) found that prosocial values lie at the heart of OCB and role identity, while benevolence is considered a key element of personal values (e.g., Schwartz, 1994). According to Kim et al. (2013), disposition leads to OCB, and studies show that personality traits such as agreeableness and extraversion contribute to supporting others (Bowling, Beehr, & Swader, 2005; Zellars & Perrewé, 2001).

Consequences for the Giver of Support

While studies using the theoretical frameworks noted above have revealed the reasons support may be given to others in organizations, less attention has been paid to the consequences for the giver. According to Koopman et al. (2016), there are both bright and dark sides to the concept of OCB, which is not only about giving support. The bright side includes the “feel good” factor of helping others, building relationships, and demonstrating competence. In this regard, Lam, Wan, and Rousin (2016) found that daily OCB led to more vigor in their participants, through an enriched sense of meaningfulness of work. Helping others has been found to enhance one’s own self-esteem, reduce depression and stress (Gilbert et al., 2011), create greater intimacy with others, and provide “a quietness in the soul,” as one respondent in a volunteer health care initiative put it (Schwartz & Sendor, 1999, p. 1572). Colbert et al. (2016) found that giving support was a fundamental element of establishing and cementing collegial relationships and Dutton et al. (2014) argue that compassion enables people to experience greater meaningfulness of work, positive emotions, job satisfaction, and life satisfaction. Reciprocity is a motive for supporting others; either it encourages support to be given or it is expected as a return on the investment of effort and emotion (Bowling et al., 2005; Halbesleben & Wheeler, 2011; Kim et al., 2013; Knoche & Waples, 2016; Matta, Scott, Koopman, & Conlon, 2015).

In terms of the negative consequences of providing support, studies show that the less-explored dark side of OCB includes emotional exhaustion, lower job satisfaction, and lower affective commitment (Halbesleben & Wheeler, 2011; Koopman et al., 2016). Given the considerable expenditure of time, emotion, and effort that may accompany OCB, it is plausible that, in supporting others, those demonstrating OCB may find it draining (Bolino, Hsiung, Harvey, & LePine, 2015; Trougakos, Beal, Cheng, & Zweig 2015) and therefore avoid subsequent support behaviors. In the context of support, it would be expected that employees show concern for others and suppress feelings such as irritation, frustration, and anger that they are being distracted from their own tasks by the needs of others or because their emotional reserves are being depleted (Hobfoll, 2001). Strazdins and Broom (2007) observe that companionship and help, two key elements of giving emotional support, should create a bond between the giver and the receiver that satisfies both. However, their study also showed that the effort of dealing with colleagues’ negative emotions had adverse psychological consequences for the givers. The negative consequences of emotional contagion, the “catching of emotion,” and emotional labor, the need to regulate their emotions when dealing with others, undermined the givers’ own well-being. Yang, Liu, Nauta, Caughlin, and Spector (2016) found that the benefits of giving support are sometimes outweighed by the costs: “Social burden can function as a type of job demand because the process of handling it depletes burdenees’ affective, cognitive and physical resources” (p. 72) and leads to what Bolino et al. (2015) term citizenship fatigue. Therefore, as Matta et al. (2015) observe, “In some cases leaders may actually benefit from providing a ‘reality check’ to an overly needy or high-maintenance subordinate” (p. 1704). The same could apply to colleagues. In a recent study of nurses, Yang, Sliter, Cheung, Sinclair, and Mohr (2018) found reciprocity to be a key factor in the provision of support and that others’ expectations of it can deplete a giver’s coping resources.

It should also be noted that qualitative studies on giving support at work are rare. In one study of social support for office workers in a local authority by Collins, Hislop, and Cartwright (2016), one of the participants reported, “[I] can tell what moods certain staff are in. I know a lot of their personal lives, backgrounds, if they’ve had problems I can see if somebody’s a bit more cheerful than the day before” (p. 169). A participant in Colbert et al.’s (2016) study on workplace relationships noted a form of appraisal and informational support, “I was able to help Sarah recognize her abilities and encourage her to develop those further. I enjoyed helping her make difficult decisions, and felt privileged to help her grow professionally and personally” (p. 1203). Responses in these studies, however, had little focus on helping staff cope with stress. Lysaght and Larmour-Trode (2008) interviewed eight supervisors of injured employees returning to work in a municipality and found that most believed that support, in terms of House’s (1981) fourfold categorization (instrumental, emotional, informational, and appraisal), was critical to the integration and physical and psychological well-being of the recently returned staff.

Supporting Others Through Stressful Organizational Change

Organizational change can be stressful in terms of both processes and outcomes. The processes of change may be too quick or too slow (Smollan, Sayers, & Matheny, 2010), be characterized by uncertainty (Bordia et al., 2004; Lawrence & Callan, 2011), exclude participation in decision making (Riolli & Savicki, 2006), and/or be accompanied by poor communication (Bordia et al., 2004). Stressful outcomes include anticipated or actual loss of jobs, increased workloads, fractured relationships, and reduced self-efficacy (Robinson & Griffiths, 2005; Swanson & Power, 2001; Vardaman, Amis, Dyson, Wright, & Randolph, 2012). Support from others in these circumstances is important both for the well-being and performance of the recipients and for the success of the change itself (Fugate et al., 2002).

Previous research shows that supported employees benefit from support (from supervisors, colleagues, and outsiders, such as partners, families, and friends) in dealing with stressful change and in functioning efficiently (e.g., Fugate et al., 2002; Lawrence & Callan, 2011; Swanson & Power, 2001). The perspective of the support giver in contexts of organizational change, however, has seldom been explored, and qualitative studies on giving support to others during stressful change are rare. Hewison (2012) interviewed nurse managers on their perceptions of change in the National Health Service of the United Kingdom, but without a focus on stress or support. Positive and negative consequences were revealed by one nurse manager who observed that, in communicating change,

it is just having the time to put into people . . . Sometimes you give a hell of a lot more than you get back, but it is good . . . and I enjoy it immensely, but sometimes when I go home I, think, Oh God. (p. 861)

It is also important to discover how and why the levels, types, targets, antecedents, and consequences of support vary through different phases of a change. While there are not always clear markers of these phases (Cunningham et al., 2002), it is likely that support oscillates over time as the change unfolds. For example, in studying a merger over four phases, Fugate et al. (2002) reported that emotional and instrumental support declined between the anticipatory, interim, and final stages but rose during the “aftershock.” They believed that as employee perceptions of control grew over time, less support was needed—and offered—but increased when the target’s resources were most depleted (Hobfoll, 2001). Support may also shift from one form to another. For example, emotional support may be welcome in the initial phase of uncertainty and threat, where people fear losing their jobs. Instrumental support (e.g., training in job application techniques or new skills) may be more welcome during the transition or aftermath of such changes (Swanson & Power, 2001). Informational support has been found to be helpful throughout (Bordia et al., 2004).

Despite the many frameworks of social support, in change and other organizational contexts, we still have inadequate knowledge of what type of support is given, to whom and why, or what the consequences are for the giver. We present a model here (Figure 1) that identifies key factors involving the provision of support.

Figure 1.

Giving support in the context of stressful organizational change.

In addition to the model, we contribute to the literature by presenting insights from interviews with change participants, many of whom, entirely unprompted, volunteered reflections of the support they gave or denied to others, suggesting the salience of this experience to respondents in times of stress and change.

Method

Research Site

Access was granted to clinical and administrative staff by the human resources department of a District Health Board (DHB), a regional provider of public health care in New Zealand. This sector has been through considerable change over the past two decades in an attempt to operate more efficiently with constrained budgets, but with the goal of improving patient outcomes (Gauld, 2016). The DHB in question operated on several sites and had been through a series of restructures and other changes that had resulted in redesigned roles, new expectations, and, in some cases, redundancies and redeployment. Participants were asked to volunteer for interviews for a project titled Stressful Organizational Change. The first author conducted 31 semistructured interviews with staff lasting between 45 and 75 minutes in a wider study of stressful organizational change. Questions were asked about the causes and consequences of stress, before, during, and after a change they had experienced, and the strategies they used to cope, including seeking and accepting support. Of the participants, 19 worked in clinical roles (e.g., speech language therapy and nursing) and 12 were in administrative positions (e.g., accounting and training). There were 25 women and 6 men; 22 White, 3 Maori, 2 Pacific Islanders, and 4 Asian. Many were in managerial or team leader roles (2 senior, 8 middle, 15 supervisory or professional team leaders). Interviews were recorded and transcribed. The 31 participants were coded from A to FF.

Data Analysis and the Role of Abductive Research

Interviews are situations where, as many scholars maintain, reality is co-constructed by the interviewer and the interviewee (e.g., Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009; Myers, 2013). Evidence of this in our study was the high number of participants (17 of 31) who spontaneously referred to supporting others. According to Myers (2013), the theoretical framework you choose “as a product of your literature review . . . drives how the research project is carried out” (p. 23). In this case, while it did not influence the interview questions (which were about receiving support), the model in Figure 1 enabled the data analysis.

As a research method, deductive qualitative research starts with research questions to be answered, and interview questions are subsequently asked to elicit responses to issues raised by or overlooked by previous studies. Bitektine (2008) notes that a qualitative case study approach can be used to seek patterns of outcomes of several, possibly interacting, variables but he cautions that retrospective research design (inferring hypotheses from existing theory that fit neatly with the data gathered) is subject to researcher biases, and, citing Campbell, “post hoc rationalization” (p. 163). In this regard, participants in the current study were explicitly asked whether they had received support and from whom, as a strategy for coping with stress before, during, and after a stressful organizational change. We therefore cannot argue that support given to others was a factor we were exploring at the outset.

A second research method, inductive research, seeks meaning in the words of subjects and aims to understand the causes of phenomena. According to Eisenhardt, Graebner, and Sonenshein (2016), inductive methods are helpful when constructs are not easy to identify or measure and the aim is to generate new theory. As a deliberately planned strategy, inductive research tends to ask participants to talk about specific forms of experience, such as stressful organizational change, to see what issues were salient to them (Myers, 2013). Evidence of seeking and receiving support could thus be interpreted in light of previous conceptual and empirical studies. However, inductive research was not the approach chosen for the empirical work in the wider study that focused (among other factors) on support received.

A third form of investigation, abductive research, according to Magnani (2005), is “a process of inferring certain facts, and/or laws and hypotheses . . . that explain or discover some (eventually new) phenomenon” (p. 265). Timmermans and Tavory (2012) indicate that abduction “rests on the ability to recognize a finding as surprising in light of existing theories and presumes an in-depth familiarity with a broad range of theories” (p. 169). Nubiola (2005) also refers to the element of surprising discoveries that, he indicates, prompt the generation of new hypotheses. However, given that the literature is replete with insights into why people accept (or reject) certain forms of support, and from whom, and to a lesser extent why people offer support to others, we obviously cannot claim that giving support to others is a surprising finding. What was unexpected was that it surfaced spontaneously in the course of the interviews and with more than half of the participants. If, as Timmermans and Tavory (2012) explain, “abductive analysis constitutes a qualitative data analysis approach aimed at theory construction” (p. 169), our task is to interrogate the findings to either generate new theory or shed light on existing theory. Van Maanen, Sørensen, and Mitchell (2007) point out that “abduction begins with an unmet expectation and works backward to invent a plausible world or a theory that would make the surprise meaningful” (p. 1149). For our study, the “unmet expectation” did not occur but the prevalence of giving support behooves us to make sense of the surprising elements.

In the spirit of Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña (2014), our analytical sequence therefore moved

from one inductive inference to another by selectively collecting data, comparing and contrasting this material in a quest for patterns or regularities, seeking out more data to support or qualify these emerging clusters and then gradually drawing inferences between these new data segments and the cumulative set of conceptualizations. (p. 10)

In analyzing the giving of support, four key elements need to be noted: the forms of support, the target of the support, the motives of the provider and other antecedents of support, and the consequences for the giver. Support was provided by managers to their subordinates, both singly and in groups, to colleagues, to those for whom clinical team leaders were responsible for professional development, and by subordinates to their managers. The focus of the clinical team leader role in the DHB is to oversee the professional development of the assigned practitioners and the relationship is a collegial one, but goes beyond the conventional concept of people performing similar tasks or who work in the same department. In this role, there is the formal requirement of overseeing professional development and representing the interests of the group to management and other departments. It is therefore not a line management position. The team leader role, as it does for line managers, potentially embraces the four types of support proposed by House (1981): instrumental, emotional, informational, and appraisal. Some team leaders also had the role of providing professional supervision, which is not a line management role and which is played by colleagues in the same health care profession, inside or outside the organization. Professional supervision is primarily designed to encourage reflection on clinical practice (Butler & Thornley, 2014) and to some extent to help the practitioner manage stress (New Zealand Psychologists Board, 2010 ). Support of this type is primarily appraisal in nature but informational and emotional support can be provided as part of the role.

Findings

Before analyzing the findings related to providing support to others, it is important to reveal some of the causes and consequences of stress for the participants, before, during, and after the specific change to which they referred. The participants spoke of a variety of stressors during the change, particularly the uncertainty about the impact of the changes, given that significant restructuring was affecting many of them, the fact that some roles were to be disestablished and therefore staff would need to apply for new roles. Other sources of stress during the change were the lack of consultation and participation in decision making, fraying social relationships, and, of particular note, the stress of others. After the change, other stressors arose or previous ones were exacerbated, such as increasing workloads, lack of resources, relationships that were even more challenging, and anxiety about future changes. The consequences for the participants were mostly negative and manifested on physiological, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral levels.

The findings are separated into the targets of support, and, given that the focus of this article is support given during different phases of change, we chose quotes that captured the support that was offered at different times, categorized the forms of support and speculated, if it was not evident, what the motives of the givers were and what the consequences were for them. To touch on all parts of the model, some of the responses are highlighted in tables and to provide some necessary context, other responses are discussed in more detail. Given the nature of the interview questions, it was not possible to track support given by one participant to another employee through different phases of change.

Support Provided by Supervisors to Subordinates

Various forms of support, often in the same conversation or meeting, were provided by supervisors, sometimes to an individual, sometimes to a group (Table 1). While it was clear that some managers were concerned for the well-being of their staff, others also were aware of the need to provide care for patients and achieve departmental objectives.

Table 1.

Support Provided by Supervisors to Subordinates.

Quote	Phases of change	Type of support	Antecedents	Consequences for giver
I would have walked around the wards, said to the nurses, How are you going? Have you got what you need and are you getting the kind of support that you need from the doctors and everybody else? . . . I would do whatever was needed to make whatever needed to happen, happen. (R: Clinical Manager)	Before	Appraisal Instrumental	Role identityOrganizational identity	+Job satisfaction+Stronger relationships
Constantly reassuring people, no, your job’s not going to be next on the line . . . So keeping the staff on an even keel. (H: Clinical Manager)	During	InformationalEmotional	Concern for the subordinate	+Stronger relationships−Emotional labour
People crying. Being sought out to talk to and listening to it, day in and day out, was not pleasant. (A: Administrative Manager)	After	Emotional	EmpathyRole identity	−Emotional exhaustion

Some supervisors clearly identified support for others as a leadership responsibility (a construction of role identity). For example, after a change, Z, an administrative manager observed, “I think I try and help relieve stress; you’ve got a management position where you’re looking after a whole lot of people.” He had provided instrumental support to his team in the form of skills training and to one highly stressed subordinate, “I’m taking work off him all the time.” Q was in a middle management clinical role whose division had also been through a process of restructuring. She maintained that “because you’re the leader, people look to you for leadership. But they also look to you for support so they don’t expect me to be engaged in a process that might involve them losing their jobs.” She also believed it was her responsibility to help them manage their stress, “Particularly at work in health, you feel highly responsible for people’s wellbeing, and you feel like you should be able to . . . help people avoid that. When it’s unavoidable, it’s extremely stressful.” She also felt guilty that she had not done more to diminish the impact on others through better instrumental support and that her own values would in future be a stronger factor, “I’m never going to allow myself to do what I think is morally wrong; I felt that I compromised my own judgement by following the organization’s process.” G, who had been promoted after a restructure, referred to “survivor guilt” as one emotion she felt when supervising an employee who had been made redundant and was in his last few weeks of employment. This may have spurred the extra emotional support she offered him.

Support Provided to Colleagues

A number of participants gave support to colleagues who were stressed by regular work issues and changes (Table 2). Some were in the same state of uncertainty as to the future and nature of their jobs but were able to provide reciprocal collegial support, mostly emotional but to some extent informational, regarding the sharing of knowledge about job descriptions and appointment processes. Some considered colleagues as those in their own departments or professions, others provided support to those of their own ethnic group as a manifestation of social identity.

Table 2.

Support Provided to Colleagues.

Quote	Phases of change	Type of support	Antecedents	Consequences for giver
Our staff here, we’re very good, we share, they know if somebody’s stressed because of workload we help them. (DD: Administrative Employee)	Before	Instrumental and emotional	Social identity	+Collegial bonds
	Before	Instrumental and emotional	Expectations of reciprocity	+Collegial bonds
They’d come to work in tears and they wouldn’t function all day. They’d be at my door worried about the partner might’ve been out of work, or how are they going to feed the kids . . . I found that quite distressing for myself. But it was seeing their distress. I like to be supportive of my colleagues. (V: Clinical Manager)	During	Emotional	Personal and social identity	−Emotional contagion
			Prosocial values	+Reduce own stress
			Empathy
			Benevolence
I think my obligation to Maori as a Maori, in terms of supporting my staff and colleagues, their family, our whanau [wider family] out in the community and about meeting the cultural values and requirements of those contracts and of our people’s expectations. (FF: Clinical Manager)	After	Instrumental and emotional	Social identity	+Stronger relationships

Although D’s role as a senior clinical manager was not affected by restructuring and redundancy, she was very upset by the stress of those around her. She provided as much emotional support of which she was capable, “supporting somebody in tears and distraught and devastated . . . and I want to support them but there’s nothing I can do about it.” She, too, acknowledged “survivor guilt,” in that she had provided too little emotional support,

I had a number of colleagues who were going through a huge amount of distress and that was probably taking about all of the emotional reserves that I had, so I didn’t have a lot left to give to anyone else.

She also felt unable to give informational/advisory support,

I know no more than what you do, I am no more or less anxious about my job than what you are about your job [but] I can’t advise you as to whether or not you should go looking for another job.

She also admitted that at times she was overwhelmed by the needs of others and labored to contain her frustration with them. “It was quite challenging at times not to swear at people and tell them to pull their heads in and not be so self-serving and entitled, and be thankful they’ve got a job and just get on with it.”

U was also in an uncertain position when clinical roles were disestablished and she and colleagues had to apply for new positions. She also found that too much collegial discussion was draining and that she neither welcomed some of it, particularly the “bitch and moan” opportunities, nor perceived that she could provide adequate support to others.

Support Provided by the Clinical Team Leaders to Team Members

Team leaders in health care are not line managers but are responsible for the professional development of colleagues and some of them also provide peer supervision regarding professional practice. These two roles require appraisal and informational support (and emotional support in stressful circumstances). Social (collegial) identity was one reason some of them had applied for team leader positions. While some participants reported how they had benefited from receiving professional support at various phases of change, the interviews only revealed the support they had offered after change, given that their roles had eventuated as result of the change. As the quote in Table 3 shows, K claimed to have had the professional role informally before the change.

Table 3.

Support Provided by the Clinical Team Leader to Team Members.

Quote	Phases of change	Type of support	Antecedents	Consequences for giver
I had the role unofficially . . . I like the idea of people coming to me for advice and support a lot anyway, so it felt like a good thing to apply for the role]. (K: Clinical Team Leader)	Before	Informational and appraisal	Virtue, concern, role identity, social identity	+Self-esteem
I felt responsible for all the people that weren’t getting supervision. I might end up with seven and then it adds to the load even more; it’s too many. (K: Clinical Team Leader)	After	Appraisal	Concern, guilt	−Work overload−Emotional exhaustion

After a restructure, P admitted her frustration that, due to budget constraints, she was unable to give instrumental support by approving certain professional development opportunities or extra computer facilities. To manage her own workload, she also felt it necessary to allocate less time (and therefore less appraisal and informational support) to the professionals in her team:

If I’ve got to get something done I will shut the door and get it done so I can go home and sleep, otherwise if I don’t I will wake up in the night. So I’m more focused on getting what I need to get done and probably less available to my staff than I used to. . . . It bothers me that I don’t know what’s necessarily happening to them on a personal level, day to day, when they have issues they have to come to me to talk about them.

Support Provided by the Subordinate to the Supervisor

Only two instances of employees supporting their supervisor of support were seen in participant comments (Table 4). In the first, DD was in a department providing support services to Pacific Island patients, one of the departments designated for a merger with that of a contiguous DHB. The manager’s role was about to be disestablished, but the status of participant’s job was yet to be decided. Regarding the regular pressures of the department, she noted that the manager was always supportive of her staff and, in return, they provided instrumental support. When the impending changes to the department and managerial position were announced (but had not yet played out at the time of the interviews), DD and her colleagues also provided emotional support to their manager.

Table 4.

Support Provided by the Subordinate to the Supervisor.

Quote	Phases of change	Type of support	Antecedents	Consequences for giver
[When she is] stressed out, because she hasn’t finished all the appointment callings, we all help her out. We’re like, What do you need to be done? What can we do to help you? Then she tells us, then we all take charge of whatever she tells us we need to do. (DD: Administrative Employee)	Before	Instrumental and emotional	Social identity	+ Stronger vertical and collegial relationships
	Before	Instrumental and emotional	Reciprocity	+ Stronger vertical and collegial relationships
We support her . . . we encourage her. (DD: Administrative Employee)	During	Emotional	Social identity	+ Self-esteem
	During	Emotional	Empathy	+ Manage own stress

The second case indicates how varying forms of support can be given to different targets on the same change-related issue. In an administrative role, F was in an ambiguous position at the early stages of a change that also involved a move from one hospital to another some distance away. Although she was “informally managing” a staff member who was stressed by moving, F’s managerial role had not yet been confirmed and, with her own manager, she had handled a difficult situation by providing a combination of emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal support, some directed at the stressed employee, some at the manager.

I very much listened to every one of [the employee’s] concerns. . . . It was very raw and emotional so we sat down and we talked about it first of all to simply air all of the concerns and . . . we talked about whether there were any other options that we could explore. . . . I was a sounding board; I was able to hear both sides and, I guess, offer any guidance to both parties as to what might help find the best solution for everyone concerned.

Discussion

Our findings reveal that many participants spontaneously revealed that they had supported others before, during, and after stressful change. It is likely that the history of the relationships between the support giver and the target provides a backdrop to phases of stressful change. The four types of support categorized by House (1981), instrumental, emotional, informational, and appraisal, may be offered at any phase to various targets, subordinates, colleagues, and supervisor. Motives for support, focused on the other(s), the organization, and the self, are concerned both with the forms and the targets of support. Possible consequences are identified and designated as positive or negative.

In the current study, the targets of support indicate that many relationships depend on support for organizational functioning and individual well-being (Morrison, 2009). The four types of support categorized by House (1981) were evident in the participants’ comments, of which instrumental and emotional support were the most common, and which are usually researched in empirical studies of organizational change (e.g., Fugate et al., 2002; Swanson & Power, 2001). There were also parallels to the terms of support referred to by Russell et al. (1987), such as guidance and nurturance, and by Drach-Zahavy (2004), such as, helping and maintenance.

The quality of relationships before change may influence the provision of support during and after change, and it is not unexpected that an employee will offer support to some subordinates, colleagues, or supervisors, but not to others. Those whom we like tend to be given more support and those who have previously given us support have earned ours (Kim et al., 2013; Matta et al., 2015). This may be one reason that prompted the support offered by DD and her colleagues to their supervisor. Status differences affect targets of support in complex ways (Doyle et al., 2016). This may explain why only two participants spoke of support for their supervisor. Forms of support may also vary. For example, a nurse may agree to take an extra shift while a colleague applies for a newly designed position (instrumental support), show empathy (emotional support) when the colleague is redeployed to an unfamiliar department, brainstorm ideas on actions that could be taken (appraisal support), and provide advice on how to cope (informational support).

Sometimes, it was quite clear in our study what the antecedents and motives for support were, but at other times, they could only be inferred. On a closer interrogation of our data and also of the literature on support, we discerned that motives were focused on the other(s), on the organization, and on the self, but that more than one could be in play during any phase of change. Given that support is clearly aimed at others, and may be provided because it contributes to organizational efficiency, the less evident focus is on the self—that helping others may help oneself.

Support may be targeted at an individual for whom we have some affection or sympathy, as the literature on OCB indicates (Matta et al., 2015). It can also be directed at a group. The support of DD for her Pacific Island supervisor, and of FF for his Maori colleagues, shows how (ethnic) social identity can be one foundation stone of workplace support. Social identity, which has cognitive and affective undertones (Haslam et al., 2019), also drove other forms of support in the current study, such as the collegiality in some professional health care and administrative teams. Finkelstein (2006) argues that role identity is one antecedent of workplace support. This type of identity emerges over time when one’s self-perceived role is reinforced by the expectation of others, a point also made by Kim et al. (2013). In our study, some participants spoke of their need as leaders, to support their staff. LMX theory (e.g., Matta et al., 2015) has shown that leaders are more likely to support a subordinate when a mutually satisfying relationship has developed.

Support for other people may derive from concern for the efficiency and reputation of the organization or concern for some of its stakeholders (e.g., patients and their families and friends). OCB is influenced by perceptions of organizational support previously received (Eisenberger et al., 1986) and by a supportive organizational culture. However, during stressful organizational change, the negative emotions experienced by some employees may undermine their willingness or capacity to support others.

A focus on the self has rarely informed research into the provision of support but emerged as a likely driver in our study. Values and disposition, and the interplay between them, are likely antecedents of supportive behavior in change contexts. Prosocial behavior is infused with affect, notably empathy and compassion (Gilbert et al., 2011) and is occasionally based on the need to restore justice (Blader & Tyler, 2009; Knoche & Waples, 2016). In our study, some staff felt threatened by possible redundancies and by having to apply for redesigned jobs, both perceived as unfair by some victims and their supportive colleagues, supervisors, and subordinates. Kim et al. (2013) argue that OCB is partly motivated by prosocial behavior (helping others) and by impression management. Some of the participants helped others because supporting them, as K reflected, “felt like a good thing to do.” Reciprocity is also a trigger of support (Bowling et al., 2005; Halbesleben & Wheeler, 2011; Kim et al., 2013; Knoche & Waples, 2016; Matta et al., 2015). The desire or obligation to reciprocate was evident in the support of D and her colleagues for their supervisor’s support. Impression management and enhancing one’s status are other motives researchers have previously identified for supporting others (Doyle et al., 2016; Finkelstein, 2006; Kim et al., 2013). According to Haslam, Jetten, Postmes, and Haslam (2009), social identity is “central to the accumulation of health-related social capital” (p. 11). However, there was no evidence of impression management in our interviews. Therefore, supporting others with whom we identify helps us on a psychological level—it strengthens relationships and enhances self-esteem.

One stressor seldom found in the literature on job stress is the stress of others. In the current study, a number of participants reported that seeing their colleagues’ stress caused or exacerbated their own stress. According to Petitta, Jiang, and Härtel (2017), emotional contagion, the spreading of emotion from one person to another, is particularly prevalent in health care settings, partly from patients but especially from staff. Yang et al.’s (2018) study of nurses revealed that contrary to their “dark side” hypothesis that frequent support for others can be stressful, engagement did not drop. Some of the responses of our participants could be interpreted as giving support as a means of coping with their own stress, despite the lack of explicit statements indicating this as a strategy. This was one of the surprising findings of the study. Two managers (D and G) explicitly referred to “survivor guilt” in the context of redundancies, and K, a professional team leader felt so worried—and possibly guilty—about staff not getting professional supervision that she increased her own heavy workload by taking on more supervisees. Strazdins and Broom’s (2007) found support for their hypothesis that helping others mitigates the giver’s negative feelings elicited through a process of emotional contagion, particularly when there is a close relationship with the receiver. It could be argued that those in the same boat often support one another, although some may be more stressed than others, and the act of giving provides a sense of validation of the idealized self, as Strazdins and Broom indicate. Another possible reason is that when people are privy to others’ angst, their own situations may seem comparatively less dire.

Hobfoll’s (2001) conservation of resources theory offers another possible reason why people give support to others at work or are reluctant to do so. Giving support to others builds credit that can be tapped when necessary. Lam et al. (2016) found that OCB can also increase the perceived meaningfulness of work and thereby create energy and vigor, in other words, it can add to the store of resources. Conversely, supporting others on an instrumental level can increase our own workloads, and other forms of support can deplete our emotional resources (Hewison, 2012; Trougakos et al., 2015, Yang et al., 2016). In our study, D struggled to provide ongoing emotional support to others and U found that constant group harping on the stresses of change, albeit a form of support, became counterproductive.

Limitations and Further Research Directions

The key limitation of our study was that we did not explicitly investigate support for others in the interviews. Inferring meaning from transcript data is subject to possibly unfounded assumptions and the posthoc rationalization that Bitektine (2008) warns against. While some participants did provide reasons for supporting others, there may have been additional reasons, and few spoke of the consequences for themselves. We assume that some of the participants may have supported others to alleviate the stress they experienced through emotional contagion, an aspect of relationships noted by Schwartz and Sendor (1999). Petitta et al.’s (2017) study focused only on anger and joy as contagious emotions affecting doctors and nurses. Therefore, emotional contagion in the context of stressful organizational change, and its relevance to supporting others, needs further investigation. In similar vein, previous studies have reported that OCB and the emotional labor it may require lead to emotional exhaustion (Bolino et al., 2015; Strazdins & Broom, 2007; Trougakos et al., 2015). There was evidence of this in the current study and of the anticipated personal costs of providing emotional support that discouraged some participants. Since these aspects were not directly investigated, the field is wide open for further research. Longitudinal studies (e.g., Cunningham et al., 2002; Fugate et al., 2002) are especially useful in unpacking the variations of different forms, targets, motives, and consequences of giving support through different phases of change.

Second, the roles of disposition, values, and identity were not investigated in this study, but they surfaced in comments on providing support or declining to do so. Previous studies have shown that concern for others motivates OCB (e.g., Finkelstein, 2006; Kim et al., 2013) and that empathy and compassion elicit emotional support (Drach-Zahavy, 2004; Gilbert et al., 2011; Knoche & Waples, 2016). Identity in various forms—personal, social, role, and organizational—appears to infuse support relationships (Finkelstein, 2006; Haslam et al., 2011), but its relevance was mostly inferred in this study. For example, to what extent did the survivor guilt that two participants spoke of challenge their values and identities or undermine their self-efficacy?

Third, it remains unclear why one person or group was given support. Future qualitative studies should be able to dissect the history of personal relationships to ascertain whether the target of support had provided support in the past to the giver, whether there was a particularly strong relationship between the two, whether this was a dominant agreeableness trait of the giver (Dutton et al., 2014; Finkelstein, 2006), or whether the giver was engaging in impression management (Kim et al., 2013). As Takeuchi et al. (2015) suggest, motives for OCB are often complex and interwoven, complementary and contradictory. There was limited evidence in the current study of the degree to which reciprocity underpinned the giving of support. The issues regarding to whom support is given, the form of that support, and the quality and history of the relationship that led to that support, need further exploration. For example, one could surmise that mutual collegial support would be provided by those facing the same type of change. Some of our participants did indicate that emotional support, in the form of group discussions, was beneficial to them, as it enhanced their social identity and psychological well-being. On the other hand, some found the dominant negative emotions to be detrimental rather than helpful and tended to withdraw from giving and receiving support in what one called “bitch and moan” sessions. Some did reveal what Koopman et al. (2016) refer to as the dark side of organizational OCB and one could construct informal or even formal discussions of change events as support, if they were intended by the giver or interpreted as such by the receiver.

Fourth, the relevance of gender and ethnicity in giving support was difficult to gauge, since 25 of the 31 participants were female and 22 were White. However, prior research indicates that women are more likely to both give and accept support (Morrison, 2009), particularly of an emotional nature, whereas men may be inclined to accept, but not necessarily seek, instrumental, appraisal, or informational support (Bellman, Forster, Still, & Cooper, 2003). To what extent men give emotional and other forms of support, and whether it is more to male or female recipients, needs further research. Cultural differences also influence the type and direction of support in wider social settings (Takeuchi et al., 2015) and are likely to do so in organizational change contexts too. The ethnic dimension of social identity (Haslam et al., 2009) did underpin the responses of two participants who worked in units targeted specifically at patients of their (minority) ethnic groups, but how this dimension of support is manifested in multicultural departments or relationships was not apparent.

Fifth, and in common with other studies that are done in one organization and in one sector of one country, the applicability of the findings to other organizations, industries, and national contexts can be questioned. Yet the literature does reveal the extent of workplace support during stressful change in a variety of contexts (Fugate et al. 2002; Swanson & Power, 2001), including in health care (Drach-Zahavy, 2004; Lawrence & Callan, 2011), but research into the giving of support during change needs further development.

Finally, it remains difficult to answer one of our research questions: Why did participants choose to talk about supporting others in an interview designed to explore their own experiences of change-related stress? One possible explanation is that interviews are reflective processes and the context of a stressful organizational change may have triggered memories of other experiences of its different phases. It is also possible that talking about giving support validated a sense of identity (Stets & Burke, 2014; Haslam et al., 2009). In this sense, supporting others may have produced the “feel good” factor noted by Koopman et al. (2016), which may have occurred both at the time of the change and in recalling it in the interview. Helping others who are stressed might also reduce one’s own stress and for two of the participants it might have assuaged feelings of the survivor guilt they explicitly referred to. Whatever reasons the participants may have had in providing support, it seems that it was a meaningful aspect of their experience of stressful organizational change.

Implications for Practice

From a practical perspective, given the importance of social support at work to individual well-being, group relationships, and productivity (Fugate et al., 2002; Lawrence & Callan, 2011), organizations would benefit from encouraging and training staff to develop compassion (Dutton et al., 2014; Gilbert et al., 2011) and support skills in vertical and lateral relationships, particularly when stress has manifested or could arise. When change is planned, the stressful consequences should be anticipated and managers, in particular, need to be alerted to the need for them to offer extra support. That said, caution needs to be exercised. First, while some studies show the benefits to the giver (e.g., Lam et al., 2016), studies of the draining effects of providing support reveal the toll it exacts (Bolino et al., 2015; Trougakos et al., 2015; Yang et al., 2016). Second, the person to whom support is offered must appreciate it; while some might be happy to accept one form of support (Lawrence & Callan, 2011), they might feel that their self-efficacy is undermined by another (Vardaman et al., 2012). Bolstering organizational support through employee assistance programs (Bhagat, Steverson, & Segovis, 2007) might take some of the pressure off employees needing to support one another, but given their distance, employees may not access external providers and expect more support from their managers and colleagues. Creating a supportive climate (Yang et al., 2018) undergirds efforts to provide the right forms of support during change, without imposing an unnecessary burden on managers or colleagues.

Conclusion

Given the scarcity of empirical studies into giving support to others in the context of stressful change, we have filled a gap in the extant literature. First, we have demonstrated that providing support to others was not a rare instance, with more than half of our participants volunteering information on this form of behavior and, presumably, a higher proportion actually giving support without reporting it. Second, we have shown that both the bright side and dark side of the individual support element of OCB (Koopman et al., 2016) are part of the fabric of organizational relationships and we suggest that while people may have altruistic motives in rendering support, they may also offer support to others as a strategy to meet their own psychological needs. Third, we have produced a body of qualitative data that allow for the explication or inference of motives for support, with regard to both forms and targets, when others are stressed by changing circumstances. Fourth, we have provided a model that serves as a basis for further research. While we have not generated a new theory, the abductive element of our research shows the surprising finding that offering support, as well as receiving it, is significant in times of stress and that employees may support others as a means of alleviating their own stress. That our participants volunteered this information without being asked speaks to the salience and importance of the offer and provision of support in stressful times.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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