Contact with beneficiaries has been described as an important job characteristic for shaping perceptions about the meaning of work; however, little is known about the role of negative beneficiary contact. We draw from two tenets of social information processing theory to propose that negative contact with beneficiaries has a dual effect on employees. Whereas negative contact may make employees perceive low social worth, it may simultaneously lead employees to believe they are engaging in self-sacrifice for a worthy cause—a relatively positive justification of such experiences. We investigated these ideas in three studies. In Study 1, a three-wave survey of registered nurses and their supervisors supported the hypothesized dual effect. Further consistent with our theorizing, the effect of perceived self-sacrifice on job satisfaction and performance was contingent on co-worker emotional support: at higher levels of support, perceived self-sacrifice exhibited a null relationship with satisfaction and a positive relationship with performance, whereas at lower levels of support these effects were negative. In Study 2, we again studied nurses using an experimental vignette method, showing that negative contact exhibits a causal effect on employee perceptions, and that negative contact is more likely to lead to perceived self-sacrifice when the contact is attributed to the nature of the work as opposed to one’s own performance. In Study 3, a two-wave survey of people from various occupations replicated the effects of negative contact on perceived social worth and perceived self-sacrifice. Moreover, the effect of negative contact on sacrifice was contingent on affective commitment to beneficiaries.

中文翻译：

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关系丰富的工作并不总是阳光明媚：负面受益人联系的影响

与受益人的接触被描述为塑造对工作意义的看法的重要工作特征；然而，人们对负面受益人接触的作用知之甚少。我们从社会信息处理理论的两个原则中得出结论，与受益人的消极接触对员工有双重影响。消极接触可能会使员工认为社会价值较低，但同时也可能使员工相信他们正在为有价值的事业而进行自我牺牲——这是对此类经历的相对积极的证明。我们在三项研究中调查了这些想法。在研究 1 中，对注册护士及其主管的三波调查支持假设的双重效应。进一步符合我们的理论，感知自我牺牲对工作满意度和绩效的影响取决于同事的情感支持：在更高水平的支持下，感知自我牺牲与满意度呈零关系，与绩效呈正相关，而在较低水平的支持下这些影响是负面的。在研究 2 中，我们再次使用实验性小插图方法研究了护士，表明消极接触对员工的看法具有因果关系，当接触归因于员工的性质时，消极接触更有可能导致感知到的自我牺牲工作而不是自己的表现。在研究 3 中，对来自不同职业的人进行的两波调查复制了负面接触对感知社会价值和感知自我牺牲的影响。而且，