Cultivating Effective Social Support Through Abstraction: Reframing Social Support Promotes Goal-Pursuit

Responsive support: A matter of psychological need fulfillment

Skillful responsive support facilitates coping with stressors and overcoming challenges. We posit that support responsiveness is best understood through the prism of psychological need fulfillment and as varying along two dimensions. The horizontal dimension speaks to the specificity and breadth of support (i.e., which needs, and how many, are addressed by it, respectively). The vertical dimension speaks to the degree to which support is enacted, or perceived to be enacted, in ways that touch on self-coherence needs for meaning and identity, needs tied most strongly to recipients' core selves. Empathic identification of psychological needs and of their deeper structure, often achieved through good listening, is argued to be the key for effective responsive support.

The skills that help employees adapt: Empirical validation of a four-category framework

Globalization, technological advances, economic and geopolitical shocks, pandemics, and any number of novel or unanticipated events have one thing in common: they represent change and require dynamic responses and adaptation from organizations, teams, and individuals. A critical resource for individuals to be adaptive are broad skills relevant to varied organizational conditions. These adaptive skills have been discussed in diverse venues but rarely in the organizational literature. Also, most, if not all, of extant conceptual frameworks related to adaptive skills remain unvalidated. The purpose of this research was to organize these skills, define and situate them in the relevant organizational and psychological literatures, and empirically test a proposed four-category framework. The experimental results supported the C+MAC framework, as skills were better categorized in terms of their theoretically related category. Additionally, the four-category framework proved a better fit to the skills compared to an influential, alternative model. The findings' implications are discussed, noting how an empirically validated framework can facilitate understanding of how individuals engage with organizational environments and organizations get their work done.

You have to let go sometimes: advances in understanding goal disengagement

While research on tenacious goal pursuit and persistence has evoked a myriad of research efforts, research on goal disengagement has rather been neglected and has been focusing mainly on positive consequences of individual differences in goal disengagement capacities. In recent years, however, research on goal disengagement has seen an upsurge in studies, specifically addressing the conceptualization of goal disengagement, the processes involved, and factors facilitating or undermining it. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered providing numerous opportunities for further investigation. With this special issue of Motivation and Emotion, we aim to stimulate such progress in research on goal disengagement. To this end, this special issue includes empirical studies with cross-sectional, prospective, longitudinal, and experimental designs with a wide range of personal and experimentally induced goals as well as invited commentaries from scholars across different psychological sub disciplines. In this introductory essay, we provide a brief review of the current state of goal disengagement research. We also provide an overview about the contributions to this special issue with reflections related to the current state of research and areas where further advancement in conceptualization and empirical studies is needed.

Analysis of Social Support as an Argument for the Sustainable Construction of the European Community Space

Cohesion policy is a constant and central area of interest across the European Union. The development and success of European society depends on the social and economic cohesion at the level of all member states. Starting from this assumption, our study will focus on the interdependence between social cohesion and social support, the latter being interpreted and analysed as a means whereby social cohesion may be achieved. Thus, understanding the manifestations of community cohesion at the level of the European communities is an essential element in this investigation, while its main purpose is to build an explanatory model for interpreting social support. Based on such a framework, social cohesion may be analysed and understood. The following measurement scales will be applied to the analysis of social support: the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, the Survey of Recent Life Experiences, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. The source of the information is a non-random sample of 1364 respondents. Data processing is based on the implementation of structural equation modelling (SEM) in order to explore the key factors that influence the perception of social support. As mentioned previously, we plan to build an explanatory model that links the perception of social support with life satisfaction and the disturbing factors that are the outcome of life experiences. A set of comparisons is also made using the independent t test and one-way ANOVA. The perception of social support is interpreted from the perspective of the occupational situation, the age category, the educational level and the marital status of respondents. The variables included in the study generally satisfied the goodness of fit indexes in accordance with the recommendations of the literature on SEM models. The conclusions of the study show that social support is at the core of community integration and one of the determinant elements of social cohesion. Everyday life events condition the perception of social support. In turn, the perception of social support acts on life satisfaction. It has been observed that a higher perception of social support may be associated with greater cohesion at the level of communities and also with a more stable social environment. We have identified a determining relationship between the perceived social support and the degree of social cohesion.

Does Connectedness Need Satisfaction Diminish or Promote Social Goal Striving?

People pursue social goals primarily to satisfy their innate need for affiliation; however, there is no consensus regarding how the successful fulfillment of affiliation need—social connectedness—influences striving for social goals. To address this issue, we proposed a dual-pathway model postulating both a negative effect of social connectedness on social goal striving via decreased emotional distress and a positive effect via increased social self-efficacy. Six studies (total N = 1,849), using cross-sectional, experimental, and daily diary methods, provided support for this model at both the between- and within-person levels. Furthermore, by distinguishing between approach and avoidance social goal strivings, and between deficit-reduction and growth connectedness need orientations, we found that the relative strength with which each path operates differed. The dual-pathway model generates theoretical and practical implications for need satisfaction and goal striving.

Social Resources as Cognitive Structures: Thinking about a Dense Support Network Increases Perceived Support

Two experiments examined how the ways in which people mentally represent their personal networks affect perceptions of social support. Social support research often uses “name generators” in which individuals are asked to choose how many people they receive support from, resulting in cognitive networks that confound size and density. Taking a fixed size approach, Study 1 showed that the density of chronically activated networks predicted perceived support in both emotional and informational domains. Study 2 assigned participants to think of a dense or sparse personal network of equal size to test whether experimentally manipulated density can influence perceived support. Results indicated that thinking of a dense (vs. sparse) network led to higher perceived support, which in turn promoted more confidence in coping with life stressors. Collectively, these studies highlight how moment-to-moment changes in cognitive networks can influence social resources and explicate key psychological mechanisms tied to cognitive social structures.

I-Through-We: How Supportive Social Relationships Facilitate Personal Growth

Personal growth is usually considered an outcome of intrapersonal processes-personal resources residing within the person. Comparatively, little research has examined the interpersonal processes underlying personal growth. We investigated how one interpersonal factor-people's relationships with others-influences personal growth. Study 1 showed that brief reminders of a supportive (vs. nonsupportive) other led people to choose a job that promoted personal growth over one that offered a higher salary. Moreover, feelings of self-confidence from thinking about a supportive (vs. nonsupportive) other mediated personal growth. Extending these results, Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that people's perceptions of how supportive their close others are predicted personal growth in two distinct cultures with varying emphasis on individual (vs. collective) growth. Consistent with Study 1's findings, the results were also mediated by feelings of self-confidence. These findings suggest that the link between supportive relationships and personal growth may reflect a general process.