Forty-four million U.S. workers hold a flexible work role in the “gig economy” in conjunction with a traditional work role. This supplementary work role is known as a side-hustle, or income-generating work performed on the side of a full-time job. Whereas organizations and scholars have tended to view side-hustles as an activity that diminishes employee performance, employees may enjoy benefits from side-hustles. Indeed, research points to the benefits of accumulating multiple roles outside of work (e.g., volunteering or family roles). I investigate these disparate perspectives about the positive and negative implications of a SHR for performance in full-time work. To do so, I draw on boundary theory, which suggests that the degree of similarity between two roles, whether different from one another or blurring together, shapes how roles affect attitudes and behavior. I tested my predictions about how SHRs influence full-time work performance in a four-wave field study of 276 employees and 170 supervisors. Specifically, I address similarity between a SHR and FWR (SHR-FWR similarity), or the number of similar requirements between a SHR and FWR and extent of those similarities. I argue that SHR-FWR similarity has a negative relationship with boundary negotiation efforts because transitions between similar roles require little psychological effort. This relationship was not supported by my findings. I also assert that SHR-FWR similarity decreases psychological detachment from full-time work as similar roles blur together and limit recovery from full-time work. This relationship was supported by my findings. I further argue that side-hustle meaningfulness moderates the relationship between SHR-FWR similarity and boundary negotiation efforts and psychological detachment from full-time work. This prediction was supported for the effect on psychological detachment from full-time work. Finally, I examined how the effects of SHR-FWR similarity carry through to full-time work performance via exhaustion. These indirect effects were not supported. A supplemental polynomial regression analysis in which I examined status consistency was more fruitful. I found that status inconsistencies between a SHR and FWR led to increased role stress within full-time work. I conclude with a discussion of alternative approaches to understanding the confluence of SHRs and FWRs and practical implications.

Research suggests that behaving in an ingratiatory manner towards one’s supervisor is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, ingratiation is a powerful tool through which employees develop positive social exchange relationships with target audiences (i.e., supervisors) and subsequently obtain desired outcomes at work. On the other hand, third party observers of ingratiation often view this behavior (and the people enacting it) in a negative manner, thereby hindering ingratiatory employees’ ability to develop high quality social exchange relationships with these individuals. However, this research primarily focuses on how organizational actors perceive of ingratiatory employees while neglecting the social context in which this behavior occurs. This is an important limitation because there are compelling reasons to believe that the social context plays a crucial role in how individuals react to ingratiation. Specifically, the social context may influence the extent to which ingratiation is salient, valued, and/or perceived as normative behavior by organizational members both within and external to the ingratiator-target dyad, which in turn affects how this behavior relates to relationship quality with the target and observers. The objective of my dissertation is to address this limitation by integrating a social context perspective with social exchange theory to build a “frog-pond” model of ingratiation. To that end, I propose that employees’ ingratiation relative to their team members, rather than absolute levels of ingratiation, drives positive exchange quality with supervisors. Furthermore, I hypothesize that congruence between the focal employee’s ingratiation and other team members’ ingratiation increases employees’ social exchange quality with team members. I also shed light on the asymmetrical nature of ingratiation (in)congruence by investigating how different types of congruence and incongruence impact social exchange quality with team members in different ways. In addition, I examine how relative ingratiation indirectly influences supervisors’ citizenship behavior toward the focal employee via focal employee-supervisor social exchange quality, as well as how ingratiation congruence indirectly affects team members’ citizenship behavior toward the focal employee through social exchange quality between the two parties. I test my hypotheses in a multi-wave multi-source field study of 222 employees and 64 teams/supervisors.