Journal of Occupational Health Psychology Copyright 2003 by the Educational Publishing Foundation

2003, Vol. 8, No. 3, 220 231 1076-8998/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1076-8998.8.3.220

The Enigma of Social Support and Occupational Stress:

Source Congruence and Gender Role Effects
Terry A. Beehr and Suzanne J. Farmer Sharon Glazer
Central Michigan University San Jose State University

David M. Gudanowski and Vandana Nadig Nair

Central Michigan University

Research on the potential ameliorating effects of social support on occupational stress produces
weak, inconsistent, and even contradictory results. This study of 117 employees, mostly from a
southern U.S. hospital supply company, examined potential moderators that were theorized might
reduce the confusion: source congruence (congruence between sources of the stressor and of
social support) and gender role. Congruence between the sources of stressors and of social support
appeared to make little difference in determining the moderating or buffering effect of social
support on the relationship between stressors and strain. Gender role, however, may moderate the
relationship between social support and individual strains such that more feminine people react
more strongly and positively to social support than more masculine people do.

Occupational stress occurs when characteristics of
the work environment (stressors) affect an employ-
ees health and welfare adversely (strain; e.g., Kahn
& Byosiere, 1992), but interpersonal contact with
supportive others has long been recommended as a
means of alleviating some of this strain. There are
two primary ways that social support is thought to
affect strain. It can have a direct effect in which
support directly reduces strain, perhaps by calming
the person, and it can have a buffering (type of
moderating) effect in which it weakens the relation-
ship between stressors and strains. Research results
for both of these effects have been weak and incon-
sistent, however. The present study looks at two
separate models, one investigating main effects and
one investigating moderating effects of social sup-
port. It looks at gender as a possible moderator of the
Terry A. Beehr, Suzanne J. Farmer, David M. Gu-
danowski, and Vandana Nadig Nair, Department of Psy-
chology, Central Michigan University; Sharon Glazer, De-
partment of Psychology, San Jose State University.
Suzanne J. Farmer is now at Celera Genomics, Rockville,
Maryland; David M. Gudanowski is now at Personnel De-
cisions International in Brussels, Belgium; and Vandana
Nadig Nair is now in Bangalore, India.
We thank Steve Jex, Adam Johnson, and Thomas Taber
for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of the article.
Some of these data were previously reported at a meeting of
the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in
St. Louis, Missouri, in April 1997.
Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-
dressed to Terry A. Beehr, Department of Psychology,
Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan
48859-0001. E-mail: Beehr1TA@cmich.edu
220
main effect of social support on strains, and it exam-
ines the concept of source congruence as a possible
explanation of the moderating effects of social sup-
port on the relationship between occupational stres-
sors and individual strains.
Social support sometimes has been found to act as
a moderator of the stressorstrain relationship (Kahn
& Byosiere 1992; Viswesvaran, Sanchez, & Fisher,
1999). This was once the dominant hypothesis re-
garding social support and occupational stress (Gan-
ster, Fusillier, & Mayes, 1986), but enthusiasm for it
has waned in recent years because of inconsistent
results. The moderator or buffering effect is repre-
sented by a statistical interaction in which those who
receive more social support have a weaker positive
stressorstrain relationship than those with less social
support. Overall, the research findings of buffering or
moderating effects have been rather tenuous, incon-
sistent, and unclear (Beehr, 1995; ODriscoll &
Dewe, 2001). Beehr and Glazer (2001) conjectured
that these inconsistencies may be a result of the way
social support is studied and the context in which it is
studied; their article primarily addresses cultural con-
texts. Thus prior research and discussions suggest
further examination of interaction effects, but with a
need for research to be guided by reasoned theory
that might predict conditions under which buffering
occurs or does not occur.
Overall, in spite of the common belief, intuitive
appeal, and promise of social support as a treatment
for occupational stress, its success and the specific
ways in which it might work have remained a mys-
tery. In the present study, we examined both situa-
 SOCIAL SUPPORT
tional (congruence) and personal (gender) factors.
We examined (a) the relation between social support
from multiple sources (i.e., supervisor, coworker)
and psychological strain, (b) the relation between
stressors and strains when the source of the stressor is
congruent versus incongruent with the source of the
support, and (c) gender roles as a potential moderator
of the relationship between support and strains.
Source Congruence and the Moderating Effect
of Social Support
Failure to find consistent buffering or moderating
effects for social support has led to conjecture about
the nature or very existence of social support buffer-
ing effects. Whereas some research has found the
buffering effect (e.g., Beehr, King, & King, 1990;
Lim, 1997), other research has failed to find it (e.g.,
Ganster et al., 1986; King, King, Fairbank, Keane, &
Adams, 1998; La Rocco & Jones, 1978; Wade &
Kendler, 2000), and still other studies have found a
reverse buffering effect (e.g.., Glaser, Tatum,
Nebeker, Sorenson, & Aiello, 1999; Kaufmann &
Beehr, 1986). A reverse buffering effect occurs when
social support strengthens rather than weakens the
positive relation between stressors and strains.
Viswesvaran et al.s (1999) meta-analysis argued
that theoretical attention needs to be given to the
types of social support expected to moderate effects
of specific types of stressors. As a result of the
perplexing findings, Blau (1981) had earlier sug-
gested that sources of support may need to be inde-
pendent of sources of stressors for support to be
effective. For example, how effective would the sup-
port from a supervisor be, if that particular supervisor
was also the source of the stressor? Kaufmann and
Beehr (1986) also suggested that future research
should examine this congruence between source of
the stressor and source of support as an explanation
for reverse buffering effects. Although none of these
researchers suggested a theory to explain such a
phenomenon, one explanation comes from cognitive
dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957; Harmon-Jones,
1999). When the sources of the stressor and of the
support are both the supervisor (as in the present
study), the employee may be left with two conflicting
cognitions about the supervisor (e.g., my supervisor
imposes stressors on me and my supervisor offers
support to me). According to dissonance theory,
such dissonant cognitions would be a source of dis-
comfort or tension, adding to the persons strain.
Thus congruence between source of stressor and
source of support (i.e., the source is the same person)
221
might be responsible for additional strain rather than
reduced strain, causing reverse buffering.
Regarding the source of stressors and supports, the
first hypothesis was simple: As with any stressor, the
stressors emanating from the supervisor must be re-
lated to strains. Research has not previously paid
much attention to sources of stressors, but one stres-
sor scale that for some of the items referenced the
supervisor as the source of the stressor was a role
ambiguity scale (Beehr, Walsh, & Taber, 1976). Role
ambiguity is a stressor for which it is especially likely
that the supervisor could be the source. Part of a
supervisors job is to give directions to subordinates,
and such directions can have varying degrees of
clarity. A second commonly studied stressor for
which subordinates often can attribute causation to
their supervisors is workload, and therefore we also
examined this stressor in the study. By definition,
stressors should be related to strains, but because we
had to rewrite the stressor items to make them refer-
ence the supervisor as the source of the stressor, we
needed to confirm that these revised stressor mea-
sures would be related to strains.
Hypothesis 1: Role ambiguity and workload
originating from the supervisor will be posi-
tively related to strains.
In the present study, source congruence exists
when the person or source of an employees social
support is the same as the person or source of the
stressor. Social supportstressor congruence hypoth-
eses have been proposed (e.g., Blau, 1981; Kaufmann
& Beehr, 1986) but not tested in previous research.
As suggested by Blau (1981), it may be better for
sources of support to be different from the sources of
the stressor. Otherwise, reverse buffering might oc-
cur. If stressors are due to the supervisor, having him
or her come near for any reason (e.g., even to offer
support) may be aversive, because the supervisor
becomes a stimulus reminding the subordinate of the
stress. Regarding source congruence, therefore, pri-
marily following the reasoning of Blau (1981) and of
Kaufmann and Beehr (1986):
Hypothesis 2a: When the source support is dif-
ferent from the source of the stressor (source
incongruence), the relationship between stres-
sors and strains will be moderated by social
support such that the relation between stressors
and strains will be stronger for low social sup-
port (i.e., a buffering effect) than high social
support.
222 BEEHR, FARMER, GLAZER, GUDANOWSKI, AND NAIR
Hypothesis 2b: When the sources of the stressor
and support are the same (source congruence),
the relationship between stressors and strains
will be moderated by social support such that
the relation between stressors and strains will be
stronger for high social support (i.e., a reverse
buffering effect) than low social support.
Gender Role and the Main Effect of Social
Support on Strain
Literature reviews (e.g., Beehr, 1995; Cohen &
Wills, 1985; Kahn & Byosiere, 1992; Viswesvaran et
al., 1999) and large-scale empirical studies (e.g.,
Caplan, Cobb, French, Harrison, & Pinneau, 1975)
have examined direct effects of support on strains.
There is generally a negative relation between social
support and measures of psychological strain, but the
correlations are often only in the teens or near .20
(e.g., meta-analysis by Viswesvaran et al., 1999). It
seems quite possible that the relationship might be
stronger for some people than others, and the present
study examined gender role as a possible explanation.
Gender has been found sometimes to influence the
relation between social support and strains (Billings
& Moos, 1982; Greenglass & Burke, 1988; Perrewe
& Carlson, 2002), although this has not been a wide-
spread finding (e.g., Vermeulen & Mustard, 2000).
For example, Greenglass and Burke found that social
support was negatively related to burnout in women
but not men. They suggested that women may use
social support more effectively than men Because
asking for help is congruent with traditional feminine
gender role prescriptions and noncongruent with
those prescribed by the masculine gender role
(Greenglass & Burke, 1988, p. 226).
Based primarily on Greenglass and Burkes (1988)
reasoning, a logical alternative explanation to ones
gender as a characteristic influencing the effects of
social support is ones gender role. Prior studies
regarding gender and social support may have been
based on stereotypical viewpoints regarding tradi-
tional behaviors assumed to be commonly exhibited
by men and women, but gender roles rather than
biological sex may be responsible for differences
found. In fact, reasoning usually given for a possible
effect of gender is based directly on characteristics of
the gender role rather than on biological sex (e.g.,
Greenglass & Burke, 1988). These gender roles are
not, of course, perfectly matched to actual gender.
The masculine gender role has generally been de-
scribed as focusing on instrumentality, competence,
assertiveness, and independence, whereas the femi-
nine gender role displays characteristics that empha-
size warmth, nurturance, and compassion (Bem,
1974). Although it is generally believed that women
tend to assume traditional feminine characteristics
and men assume more masculine characteristics, it is
more likely that these feminine and masculine role
characteristics vary across individuals within each
gender. The gender roles can then account for the
variation in the use of social support and its relation
with strains, but previous research has not addressed
this possibility. On the basis of this rationale, the
following hypothesis was proposed:
Hypothesis 3: The relationship between social
support and strains will be moderated by gender
role such that the negative relation between sup-
port and strains will be stronger for people as-
suming feminine roles (high femininity) than for
those assuming masculine roles (low femininity).
The present study, therefore, advanced our knowl-
edge about social support and occupational stress by
testing proposals about source congruence and buff-
ering effects of social support, as well as about gen-
der role and main effects of social support.
Method
Sample
Questionnaires were distributed to 270 employees of ad-
ministrative, customer service, distribution, and manage-
ment departments in a southern hospital supply company.
Of those, 102 returned completed questionnaires. Because
this number was smaller than expected and desired, through
personal contacts we were able to distribute 15 more ques-
tionnaires each to both an aircraft manufacturer and a phar-
maceutical company in the same city, with 9 and 6 re-
sponses, respectively. The total response rate was 39%.
Among the total 117 participants, 57% were female; 85%
were White, 9% Black, 3% American Indian, 1% Hispanic,
and 1% Asian American; the average age was 38.8 years.
The average number of hours worked per week was 45.6 hr.
Of the sample, 58% were married, and 46% of respondents
had no dependent children at home. Finally, 71% had high
school diplomas, 21% had bachelors degrees, and 3% had
graduate degrees.
Measures
Social support from supervisors and from coworkers.
Two social support measures were used: social support from
the supervisor and social support from the coworkers. A
modified version of the social support scale developed by
Beehr et al. (1990) and more recently used in Chen, Popo-
vich, and Kogan (1999) and in Stephens and Long (2000)
measured social support that specifically assessed the con-
tents of communication between the respondent and other
 SOCIAL SUPPORT
people at work. The original scale was constructed specif-
ically for a sample of nurses, and therefore, the content of
five items needed to be modified to make the items appli-
cable to the different job types in the present sample. For
example, the item We talk about problems in working with
doctors was changed to We talk about problems in work-
ing with bosses (contact people in the company informed
us this would be the appropriate terminology). There were
two social support scales, one asking about communications
with supervisors and one asking about communications with
coworkers, used to measure the three contents of commu-
nication (i.e., positive, negative, and non-job-related com-
munications). The original scale only measured social sup-
port from supervisors, but subsequent studies (Beehr, Jex,
Stacy, & Murray, 2000; Fenlason & Beehr, 1994) had
adapted it for coworkers simply by changing the referent
person, and that was also done in the present study. A main
focus of the present study was the comparison of results for
supervisor support versus coworker support, and therefore
the three supervisor support subscales and the three co-
worker subscales were collapsed into two scales by averag-
ing the mean scores of the appropriate subscales. Reliabili-
ties for these scales were .92 for the supervisor support scale
(M 2.36, SD 0.78) and .85 for the coworker support
scale (M 3.16, SD 0.60). The response scale ranged
from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). After
reverse scoring the items that are worded negatively, higher
scores were indicative of more support. The mean for the
supervisor support scale was a little below the scales mid-
point, which may indicate a sample with somewhat low
communications support from the supervisor.
Stressors from supervisors. Two stressors were mea-
sured in the study: workload due to the supervisor and role
ambiguity emanating from the supervisor. Because stressor
measures do not usually focus on the source of the stressor,
the present study needed to adapt items from previ-
ous scales.
Role ambiguity emanating from the supervisor (M
2.92, SD 1.22, .76) was measured by a modified
four-item Likert-type scale reported by Beehr et al. (1976).
Two items, which measured whether supervisors made sure
people had clear goals to achieve and how people should do
their work, were reversed scored in the present study and
were identical to those used in the original scale. The other
two items needed to be modified to indicate the supervisor
as the source of the ambiguity. These two items asked if
people knew what the supervisors performance standards
were for them and whether it was clear what the supervisor
expected of them (reverse scored). The response options
ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).
Workload due to the supervisor (M 3.03, SD 0.85,
.85) was measured by a five-item Likert-type scale that
consisted of three items modified from a workload scale by
Spector, Dwyer, and Jex (1988) and two items modified
from a role overload scale by Beehr et al. (1976). As with
the previous scale, the goal was to assess the extent to which
the source of the stressor was the supervisor. The items in
the workload scale by Spector et al. (1988) were modified as
follows: How often does your supervisor require you to
work very hard? How often does your supervisor require
you to work very fast? and How often does your super-
visor give you more work than you can do well? Likewise,
the two items from the scale by Beehr et al. were modified
to reference the supervisor. The two items were How often
does your supervisor give you too much work for one
223
person to do? and How often does your supervisor give
you enough time to do what is expected of you on your
job? Response options for all five items ranged from 1
(never) to 5 (extremely often).
Strains. Three potential stress outcomes or strains were
measured: job dissatisfaction, anxiety, and psychological
strain. Job dissatisfaction (M 2.93, SD 1.67, .90)
was measured by reverse scoring the three-item job satis-
faction measure of the Michigan Organizational Assessment
Scale (Cammann, Fichman, Jenkins, & Klesh, 1979). An
overall job satisfaction index was created by averaging the
responses to the three items (two items were reverse
scored). Response options ranged from 1 (strongly dis-
agree) to 7 (strongly agree). High scores indicated
more dissatisfaction.
Anxiety (M 2.25, SD 0.73, .89) was assessed
using a modified version of the state scale of Spielbergers
(1979) StateTrait Personality Inventory that contained 10
items asking the respondents to describe how they felt at
work during the past 30 days.
Psychological strain (M 1.95, SD 0.59, .90) was
measured by the 12-item version of the General Health
Questionnaire (GHQ; Banks et al., 1980; Goldberg, 1972).
Respondents were asked to respond to symptoms that oc-
curred over the last 4 6 weeks, and all items were also
preceded by the phrase Have you recently . . . Some
items included lost much sleep over worry? been able to
face up to your problems? and been feeling unhappy or
depressed? A composite index was formed by calculating
the mean of the items, which were answered on a 4-point
Likert-type scale.
Gender role characteristics. Gender role characteristics
were measured with a modified version of the Bem Sex-
Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974). Only the Masculinity
and Femininity scales, each containing 20 personality char-
acteristics, were used in the present study. Using a 7-point
Likert scale anchored at 1 (never or almost never true) and
7 (always or almost always true), respondents were asked to
indicate how well each of the characteristics describes him-
self or herself. Masculinity and Femininity subscale scores
were computed as the mean rating of all masculine and
feminine items, respectively.
Six graduate students in industrial and organizational
psychology, acting as subject matter experts, were provided
with a definition of social support and were asked to rate the
degree to which each of the 40 personality characteristics
from the BSRI were descriptive of people who would like to
receive some type of social support. For example, some of
the items these graduate students rated included Affection-
ate people like receiving social support and Independent
people like receiving social support (affectionate and in-
dependent were potentially self-descriptive items on the
gender role inventory). Response options ranged from 1
(strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The characteristics
associated with the words in the feminine role were judged
as more likely to be related to liking to receive social
support than the masculine characteristics were (M 4.18
vs. M 3.05), t(5) 5.25, p .01. This preliminary
analysis was a check that was consistent with our assump-
tion that people with more feminine and less masculine
characteristics were more likely to want or desire social
support. The Masculine subscale was reverse scored, and
then the mean of the Feminine and Masculine subscales was
calculated as the gender role score (M 4.16, SD 0.51).
224 BEEHR, FARMER, GLAZER, GUDANOWSKI, AND NAIR
A higher score, therefore, indicated more femininity and
less masculinity. The reliability was .81.
Results
Hypothesis 1 was strongly supported. All six cor-
relations between the two stressors and the three
strains were positive, significant (p .01), and strong
or at least moderately strong (see Table 1). The
strongest correlation was between workload and psy-
chological strain (r .50), and the weakest was
between ambiguity and anxiety (r .25). Two out-
comes, anxiety and psychological strain, were
strongly related to each other (r .76), but their
relationships with the stressors were not identical. In
fact, their correlations with ambiguity were signifi-
cantly different from each other, t(114) 3.70, p
.01. Therefore they give somewhat different informa-
tion about their relationships with stressors.
Regarding Hypotheses 2a and 2b, three of the six
interactions between workload and support predict-
ing strains were significant (see Table 2), and one of
the six interactions between ambiguity and support
was significant (see Table 3), controlling for age and
gender. Workload interacted with both supervisor
support (R2 change .03) and coworker support (R2
change .06) to predict anxiety, and workload in-
teracted with coworker support to predict psycholog-
ical strain (R2 change .03). Ambiguity interacted
with supervisor support to predict anxiety (R2
change .01). These four significant interactions
were examined further. Two of them were incongru-
ent situations (the level of stressor originating from
the supervisor, combined with the level of support
coming from the coworkers), and the other two con-
stituted congruent situations (the level of stressor and
Table 1
Correlations Among All Variables (N 117)
Variable 1 2
Stressors generated by supervisor
1. Ambiguity
2. Workload .31**
Individual difference
3. Gender role .10 .17
Socially supportive communications
4. With supervisor .31** .15
5. With coworkers .07 .35**
Outcomes
6. Job dissatisfaction .37** .32**
7. Anxiety .25** .47**
8. Psychological strain .46** .50**
* p .05. ** p .01.
the support both originating from the same source,
the supervisor). The hypotheses predicted that the
two interactions in the incongruent situations would
be instances of buffering effects, whereas the two
congruent interactions would be reverse buffering.
To examine the nature of each interaction, we divided
the sample at the median on the appropriate social
support variable and calculated bivariate regressions
of the strain on the stressor within each subsample.
Figures 1 and 2 show that in each pair of regressions,
the beta coefficients for the low social support con-
ditions were more positive than the betas for the high
social support conditions. Thus all four interactions
were buffering effects. This was true regardless of the
stressor (workload vs. ambiguity) and regardless of
the strain (anxiety vs. psychological strain). Because
the nature of the interaction effects was the same (all
buffering, and no reverse buffering), the source con-
gruence hypothesis was not supported.
Regarding Hypothesis 3, one of six interactions
regarding gender role was significant at p .05 (see
Table 4). Supervisor support and gender role inter-
acted to predict job dissatisfaction (R2 change .03).
In addition, the interaction between gender role and
supervisor support predicting psychological strain
was marginally significant (R2 change .03, p
.10). The nature of these two interactions was exam-
ined by dividing the sample at the median on the
moderator variable (gender role) and calculating bi-
variate regressions of the strain on social support for
each subsample (see Figure 3). The beta coefficients
for the high femininity subsample were more nega-
tive than for the low femininity subsample in each
analysis. Thus, more feminine people appear to react
more strongly to social support than less feminine or
3 4 5 6 7 8
.10
.02 .33*
.27** .15 .22*
.00 .10 .24* .33**
.01 .20* .29** .52** .76**
 SOCIAL SUPPORT 225

Table 2 account for previously inconsistent results, and we

Moderated Regressions of Outcomes on Workload examined one of each type of characteristic: (situa-
and Support tional) congruence between the source of the stressor
Criterion/ordered predictors R2 change and the social support and (personal) gender role
characteristics.
Job dissatisfaction A prerequisite to such a study is to show that
1. Demographic controls .09**
2. Workload (A) .09** 0.46 stressors emanating from the supervisor could indeed
Supervisor support (B) 0.15 lead to individual strains. This seemed very likely,
3. A B .00 0.28 but previous research has largely ignored the source
Job dissatisfaction (person) of stressors as an issue in occupational
1. Demographic controls .09**
2. Workload (A) .10** 0.54
stress. As expected, the supervisor stressors were
Coworker support (B) 0.36 strongly and positively related to the individual
3. A B .01 0.42 strains, supporting Hypothesis 1. One issue that
Anxiety needs further research concerns potential differences
1. Demographic controls .01 between stressors emanating from different sources.
2. Workload (A) .24** 0.96**
Supervisor support (B) 0.61* We would propose, for example, that stressors com-
3. A B .03* 0.74* ing from the supervisors are likely to be more potent
Anxiety than stressors coming from coworkers or people
1. Demographic controls .01
2. Workload (A) .25** 1.54**
Coworker support (B) 0.82**
3. A B .06** 1.53**
Psychological strain
1. Demographic controls .02 Table 3
2. Workload (A) .27** 0.84** Moderated Regressions of Outcomes on Ambiguity
Supervisor support (B) 0.35 and Support
3. A B .02 0.53
Psychological strain Criterion/ordered predictors R2 change
1. Demographic controls .02
Job dissatisfaction
2. Workload (A) .28** 1.18**
1. Demographic controls .09**
Coworker support (B) 0.62*
2. Ambiguity (A) .12** 0.03
3. A B .03* 1.01*
Supervisor support (B) 0.32
Note. Demographic controls were gender and age; betas 3. A B .02 0.39
are from final step (3). Job dissatisfaction
p .10. * p .05. ** p .01. 1. Demographic controls .09**
2. Ambiguity (A) .17** 0.35
Coworker support (B) 0.21
3. A B .00 0.01
Anxiety
1. Demographic controls .01
more masculine people do, supporting Hypothesis 3. 2. Ambiguity (A) .07** 0.50*
In additional analyses, separate masculine and femi- Supervisor support (B) 0.22
nine subscales were formed and were tested for their 3. A B .01* 0.28*
interactions with supervisor and coworker social sup- Anxiety
1. Demographic controls .01
port predicting the three outcomes (with age and sex 2. Ambiguity (A) .12** 0.84
as covariates). None of these interactions were Coworker support (B) 0.48*
significant. 3. A B .01 0.66
Psychological strain
1. Demographic controls .02
Discussion 2. Ambiguity (A) .23** 0.37
Supervisor support (B) 0.13
Although previous research frequently found so- 3. A B .00 0.13
cial support to be related to employee strains via Psychological strain
main effects or interactions with stressors, results for 1. Demographic controls .02
2. Ambiguity (A) .29** 0.67
main effects are often weak, and details of the inter- Coworker support (B) 0.35
actions are often puzzling. The present study sheds 3. A B .00 0.23
light on the puzzle by examining two explanations Note. Demographic controls were gender and age; betas
proposed to explain the inconsistencies. Variations in are from final step (3).
both situational and personal characteristics might p .10. * p .05. ** p .01.
226 BEEHR, FARMER, GLAZER, GUDANOWSKI, AND NAIR

Figure 1. Interactions of supervisor social support and stressors emanating from the
supervisor.

lower in the organizational hierarchy. Because people
above us in the hierarchy have more formal power
over us than people lower in the hierarchy, demand
characteristics from their messages might have more
powerful effects on us in terms of strains. Little
research attention has been given to the effects of
different sources of potentially stressful demands.
Although it was beyond the scope of this study to
examine this, it would be a timely issue for future
research.
It was also hypothesized (Hypotheses 2a and 2b),
based on previous suggestions (e.g., Blau, 1981;
Kaufmann & Beehr, 1986), that congruence between
the source of stressor and the source of social support
would lead to one type of interaction (reverse buff-
ering), whereas source incongruence would lead to
another type of interaction (buffering). That is, sup-
portive communications from the supervisor would
make the presumed causal effect of stressors (also
emanating from the supervisor) on strains stronger
rather than weaker, because of the congruence be-
tween stressor and support sources. The supervisors
presence would make the stressor more salient, even
though he or she might be trying to be supportive. In
terms of cognitive dissonance, perceiving the oppo-
site (stressing and supporting) behaviors by the su-
pervisor would create unpleasant tension, thus in-
creasing the strain rather than decreasing it. This
 SOCIAL SUPPORT 227

Figure 2. Interactions of coworker social support and stressors emanating from the
supervisor.

study attempted to explain the previous puzzling re-
search results in which sometimes buffering effects
and sometimes reverse buffering effects of social
support have been found, but the hypothesis was not
supported. There were few significant interactions,
most involving the strain anxiety and the stressor
workload.
All interaction effects in the study, in both congru-
ent and incongruent situations, were buffering ef-
fects. Social support tended to make the relationship
between stressors and strains weaker regardless of
the congruence between the source of support and the
source of stressors. An alternative to the source con-
gruence hypothesis in the present study is based on
the proposition that the source of the stressor might
be the best person to provide social support, precisely
because that person is particularly relevant to the
stressful situation. That is, source congruence might
have led to favorable (buffering) effects rather than to
unfavorable effects, because the source of the stressor
(the supervisor in this study) might be in the best
position to understand the stressor and to ease the
persons reactions to it. In addition to the interaction
effects, the negative correlation between supervisor
support and ambiguity suggests that supervisor com-
munication might have a main effect, lowering the
stressor ambiguity. This is consistent with the notion
that supervisor communication might be useful for
reducing supervisor-induced stress.
These results regarding congruence lead us to
228 BEEHR, FARMER, GLAZER, GUDANOWSKI, AND NAIR

Table 4 (Viswesvaran et al., 1999). Future research should

Moderated Regressions of Outcomes on Gender examine and measure alternative forms of congru-
Role and Support ence between occupational stressors and social sup-
Criterion/ordered predictors R2 change port. Issues include the nature of the interaction (e.g.,
how logical would it seem to the receiver of support
Job dissatisfaction for someone who causes stress also to offer support),
1. Demographic controls .09**
2. Gender role (A) .05 0.70* the closeness of the relationship (e.g., even though
Supervisor support (B) 1.27 the supervisor is causing the stressor, he or she has
3. A B .03* 1.57* been a friend in the past), and the degree to which the
Job dissatisfaction stressed employee attributes causal blame for the
1. Demographic controls .09**
2. Gender role (A) .08** 0.42
stressor to the supportive person (e.g., the supervisor
Coworker support (B) 0.58 had no choice vs. the supervisor increased my stres-
3. A B .00 0.42 sors of his or her own free will).
Anxiety We also were interested in the potential interac-
1. Demographic controls .01 tions of social support and individual differences
2. Gender role (A) .01 0.32
Supervisor support (B) 0.54 variables in predicting strains. It has often been con-
3. A B .01 0.71 cluded that social support has direct relations to
Anxiety strains (e.g., Beehr, 1995; House, 1981; Vaux, 1988),
1. Demographic controls .01 but the empirical relationships have been somewhat
2. Gender role (A) .06* 0.04
Coworker support (B) 0.18
weak (Beehr, 1995; Viswesvaran, et al., 1999). One
3. A B .00 0.07 reason for these weak relationships could be that
Psychological strain there are individual difference moderators of the re-
1. Demographic controls .02 lationship; that is, the relationship is stronger for
2. Gender role (A) .03 0.53 some people and weaker or nonexistent for other
Supervisor support (B) 1.18
3. A B .03 1.50 people, perhaps because some people value social
Psychological strain support more than others (ODriscoll & Dewe, 2001).
1. Demographic controls .02 The present study only looked at one such individual
2. Gender role (A) .08** 0.09 difference (gender role), but future research on others
Coworker support (B) 0.13
3. A B .00 0.19
seems promising.
Traditional stereotypes consider women to be
Note. Demographic controls were gender and age; betas more social in nature than men, and there is probably
are from final step (3).
p .10. * p .05. ** p .01. some truth to this. Women have often been reported
to provide more advice to and do more favors for
people experiencing problems than men (e.g., a re-
view by Eagley & Crowley, 1986). They would also
benefit more when on the receiving end of such social
question the nature of the concept of congruence. We support (Perrewe & Carlson, 2002). Rather than gen-
hypothesized that source congruence (i.e., sources of der itself, however, this effect is more likely due to
stressors and supports are the same) would be more assuming the so-called feminine gender role, which
harmful than helpful. This did not happen, however, we focused on in the present study. It was expected
and the nature of congruence might need revisiting. that peoples gender roles would be related to their
Indeed, forms of congruence other than the type in social nature, and that people with more feminine
the present study have also been proposed as expla- gender role characteristics would react more posi-
nations for inconsistent interaction effects, and these tively to social support than people with less femi-
should be the focus of future research. Specificity nine or more masculine role characteristics would. In
effects were proposed by Cohen and Wills (1985) the present data, there was some evidence that this
regarding instrumental support having a buffering was true. Employees with more feminine gender
effect when the supportive behavior is congruent roles appear to react more positively to social sup-
with or specific to the stressor, and Frese (1999) port. This could be one of the explanations for pre-
found results that were somewhat consistent with vious weak results regarding the relationship between
this. Researchers have had great difficulty trying to social support and strains in general (Viswesvaran et
predict in advance when a specific type of social al., 1999). For some people, the relationship might be
support will result in buffering and when it will not, substantially stronger. This helps to explain the enig-
although explanations are often given after the fact matic discrepancy between the common belief that
 SOCIAL SUPPORT 229

Figure 3. Interactions of gender role and supervisor social support.

social support helps relieve strains and the relatively
poorer and more inconsistent record of finding strong
empirical evidence for this relationship. In our every-
day lives, we may indeed observe positive effects for
social support, but these nonsystematic observations
may be biased toward the instances in which it works
well. One such instance is apparently when the re-
ceiver of the social support is relatively more femi-
nine in his or her gender role.
Limitations
There were several limitations in the study. First,
the sample size was relatively small (N 117), thus
limiting the power to find significant interactions.
This is probably related to the fact that only 5 of the
18 total interactions tested were significant at the
traditional p .05 level. We relaxed the significance
criteria to consider results that were p .10, and this
resulted in consideration of any interaction for which
the R2 change was greater than .02. Thus, the best
estimate is that only small interactions were not de-
tected due to sample size. Second, all data were
obtained by means of a single survey at one time,
possibly inflating some relationships artificially and
making strong causal inference impossible. High cor-
relations between the stressor and the moderator can
also lead to difficulty finding interactions. Based on
230 BEEHR, FARMER, GLAZER, GUDANOWSKI, AND NAIR
the correlations in Table 1, this would primarily be a
problem for interactions of ambiguity with supervisor
support and of workload with coworker support, in
which there were moderate correlations between the
stressor and the support (.31 and .35, respectively).
Multiple regressions in Tables 2 and 3 show, how-
ever, that there were actually more rather than fewer
significant interactions with these combinations than
with other combinations of stressors and supports.
Thus it does not appear that this problem accounted
for the pattern of significant interactions. Third, for
the significant interactions, most of the changes in
slopes were not large, indicating that the moderating
effects might lead only to small differences in out-
comes for the employees. Fourth, regarding general-
ization of the results to other samples, it should be
noted that the means of the stressor and strain vari-
ables were near the low end of the scales. This raises
the issue of whether the results would have been the
same for groups of employees experiencing more
stress. A fifth limitation concerns the nature of social
support: Are the measures of communication actually
measures of social support? They were developed as
new and different operationalizations of social sup-
port because of the weaknesses and inconsistent re-
sults using other social support measures (Beehr et
al., 1990), and all subsequent research has considered
them to be measures of social support. They are very
specific indices, however, measuring contents of
communication
Future Research
Future research should continue to examine addi-
tional ways in which social support plays a role in
occupational stress. Past research, theory, and prac-
tice have focused on social support as a key variable
for mitigating the effects of stress, but the amount of
variance in strains that social support can explain
varies a great deal. As ODriscoll and Dewe (2001)
have noted, the challenge is to determine and predict
how the strength of this empirical relationship varies
in systematic ways; that is, theoretically, what are the
likely moderator variables? The answer to this ques-
tion will determine the types of social support inter-
ventions that can alleviate the effects of job stressors
on strains such as anxiety, depression, burnout, and
the attrition associated with them. Although social
support is thought to be a powerful variable in occu-
pational stress episodes, the aims are to mold and
target social support applications in more successful
ways. As Viswesvaran et al. (1999) noted, and as
exhibited in the present study, future research needs
to use theoretical or rational approaches for choosing
potential moderators to examine.
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Received August 23, 2002
Revision received January 17, 2003
Accepted March 9, 2003 y