Does Expressing Anxiety at Work Help or Hurt? The Affiliative and Social Distancing Consequences of Coworker Anxiety Expression

Integrating the emotions as social information (EASI) theory and the signaling functions of anxiety, we develop and test a within‐person dual‐path model to unravel the benefits (affiliative consequences) and costs (social distancing consequences) of daily anxiety expression at work within coworker relationships, as well as the boundary conditions that influence these outcomes from an observer's perspective. Observing a coworker expressing anxiety on a given day may elicit an employee's perspective taking due to the signal of neediness, resulting in increased helping behavior directed toward that coworker. The same expression may also evoke perceptions of incompetence because of the signal of weakness, thereby leading to greater ostracism toward that coworker. We hypothesize that the presence of overall rivalry between the employee and the anxious coworker serves as a critical boundary condition that shapes the intensity of these within‐person affiliative and socially distancing processes. We tested our theoretical model using a 10‐day experience sampling study and a within‐person experiment. Our findings inform theory and practice by extending knowledge on the positive and negative reactions to daily coworker anxiety expression and illustrating the pivotal role of rivalry perceptions in modulating reactions to coworker anxiety expression at work.