The COVID-19 pandemic saw a large-scale change in how work was performed with a rapid move to working from home where possible to support public health restrictions. From a practical point of view, this indicates that organizations can proactively foster the development of social support through practices that shape workgroup characteristics and social foci. From a theoretical perspective, this highlights the value of a relational perspective on the development of social support, a perspective that is based on the insight that social support is embedded in social relationships. The findings provide insights on the development of social support, suggesting that informal interactions provide an important mechanism for the development of social support at work. High workload and pressure from the COVID-19 pandemic reduced interactions around social foci, thus contributing to the erosion of perceived social support. Workgroup composition regarding national diversity had indirect effects on social support through informal interactions around social foci (here: joint leisure activities). Hypotheses were tested using OLS regression and mediation analysis using PROCESS. The study is based on responses from 382 seafarers to a cross-sectional online survey.
This study analyzes the impact of workgroup characteristics (i.e., workgroup composition regarding national diversity and tenure workload) and the COVID-19 pandemic on employees' perceptions of instrumental and emotional support, and examines the mediating role of informal interactions. Although the importance of social support is well-known, the factors that help to build and maintain social support are not equally well understood. Social support from colleagues is a key resource for employees and organizations, with beneficial effects on performance, employee well-being and resilience. Combined, results suggest that the polite, ritualistic, and formulaic nature of small talk is often uplifting yet also distracting. Our results also showed higher levels of trait-level self-monitoring mitigated the negative effects of small talk on work engagement. Using multilevel path analysis, our results showed that, on one hand, small talk enhanced employees’ daily positive social emotions at work, which translated into heightened organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and greater well-being at the end of the workday on the other hand, small talk disrupted employees’ ability to cognitively engage in their work, which compromised their OCB. Given that we are the first to examine small talk as an episodic phenomenon, we also conducted a scale validation of our daily small talk measure with Masters students from a University in the Northeastern US (n = 73) and two samples of employed adults registered with Amazon Mechanical Turk (n = 180 and n = 202). In a sample of employed adults recruited from a Northeast US University’s alumni database and LinkedIn (n = 151), we used an experience sampling method (ESM) to capture within-individual variation in small talk over a three-week period. Integrating theories of interaction rituals and micro-role transitions, we explore how and why seemingly inconsequential conversations during the workday generate meaningful effects on employees’ experiences. Yet, emerging research suggests small talk may have important consequences for employees. Although small talk comprises up to one-third of adults’ speech, its effects in the workplace have been largely discounted. Small talk-short, superficial, or trivial communication not core to task completion-is normative and ubiquitous in organizational life.