A post by Samantha Krauss and Ulrich Orth
As most people spend a large part of their waking hours working, there is reason to expect that the work domain affects how individuals think and feel about themselves. Experiences at work, such as job success and failure, being promoted or dismissed, and having good or bad work conditions may shape self-esteem. At the same time, it is possible that people’s level of self-esteem is an important driver of the work experiences they make. Hence, the questions that arise are: Do work experiences influence self-esteem? Or does self-esteem influence work experiences? Or both?
Let’s consider reasons why work experiences might influence self-esteem. For example, the work domain offers the opportunity to achieve ambitions, to perceive self-competence, and to feel proud of oneself. Taking on responsibility as an employee may also help to develop a more mature personality and feel better about oneself. Maybe most importantly, the job lets people experience that they are socially included and accepted, both within and outside the workplace. Perceiving that one is valued by others may greatly help to value oneself. Thus, the work domain may affect self-esteem in several ways.
Now, let’s think of reasons why self-esteem might influence work experiences. People with high self-esteem believe in themselves and might therefore select a job with more responsibility and autonomy compared with people with low self-esteem. Choosing a work environment that suits one’s own personality, including self-esteem, may lead to more motivation, better job performance, and more job satisfaction. In addition, self-esteem may shape how people cope under stressful circumstances and how they perceive their work environment (e.g., challenging versus threatening). Moreover, self-esteem affects social interactions. For example, people with high self-esteem tend to engage in more open behaviours to improve connectedness, whereas people with low self-esteem sometimes behave distant to protect themselves from being rejected. Consequently, people with high self-esteem are more likely to succeed in building and maintaining positive social relationships at work, to receive more social support by coworkers and supervisors, and, ultimately, to be more successful at work.
Taken together, it is plausible that work experiences influence people’s self-esteem and that, vice versa, self-esteem influences work experiences. Importantly, the two directions of effects are not mutually exclusive; it is possible that there are reciprocal effects between work experiences and self-esteem. To gain better insights into prospective effects between work experiences and self-esteem, we conducted a meta-analysis that synthesized the available longitudinal evidence (the article has recently been published in the European Journal of Personality and can be found here). A crucial advantage of meta-analyses lies in the aggregation of all available data across a set of heterogeneous studies, which significantly increases the robustness and generalizability of the findings.
We were interested in comprehensively covering work experiences and therefore included a broad set of job variables (i.e., job satisfaction, job success, income, job resources, job stressors, and employment status). To identify potentially relevant studies for the meta-analysis, we searched a large psychological database, contacted authors of potentially eligible studies, requested unpublished studies via electronic mailing lists, and examined the reference sections of key papers.
Our final meta-analytic dataset consisted of 30 independent samples with data from over 50,000 individuals. About half of the participants were female and the mean age ranged from 17 to 64 years, spanning most of the work-life. Most samples were from Western cultural contexts and were predominantly White/European. The time intervals between the assessments were about two and a half years on average.
Overall, the results suggested a reciprocal pattern between self-esteem and work experiences. Thus, the findings suggested not only that people’s self-esteem is influenced by experiencing success or failure in the work domain, but also that their level of self-esteem influences their work experiences. Moreover, the results indicated that self-esteem is a stronger predictor of later work experiences than vice versa. We also tested whether the effects differed across age, gender, and length of the time interval between the assessments. The analyses suggested that this was not the case.
The overall reciprocal pattern between work experiences and self-esteem is in line with the corresponsive principle of personality development, which states that life experiences deepen those personality characteristics that have led to the experiences in the first place. For example, an individual with high self-esteem tends to experience more social support at work, while experiencing social support at work positively affects the individual’s self-esteem. Thus, the reciprocal effects imply a positive feedback loop for people with high self-esteem and favourable work experiences and, at the same time, a vicious circle for people with low self-esteem and unfavourable work experiences. Moreover, the prospective effects suggest that self-esteem is not merely a correlate of work variables, but rather serves as both predictor and outcome of these variables. In summary, the findings from our meta-analysis suggest: Yes, the work domain influences self-esteem and vice versa.