Crossover of emotional exhaustion in collaboration networks: the roles of hindrance stressors and organisational tenure

Emotional exhaustion is a prevalent response to work stress that can cross over (i.e. be transmitted) among interaction partners. The literature offers little insight into why emotional exhaustion spreads among employees who collaborate. Drawing from the challenge-hindrance stressor framework, we predict that emotionally exhausted employees will evoke perceptions of work-related hindrances, such as role ambiguity and interpersonal conflict, in collaborative partners that, subsequently, will elicit emotional exhaustion in them. Additionally, based on tenets of the job demands-resources model, we predict that the association between emotional exhaustion of others and increases in employees’ perceptions of hindrance stressors will be more pronounced among employees with shorter organisational tenure. We conducted a two-wave survey study among 1,541 employees and modelled the experiences of emotional exhaustion within employees’ collaboration networks in the organisation. Results from latent change score modelling supported the predicted indirect crossover effect among employees whose organisational tenure was relatively low. Our findings advance knowledge on the crossover of emotional exhaustion by demonstrating its indirect transmission among collaborating employees through increased work-related hindrances, conditional on organisational tenure.