Social comparisons in boundary-spanning work: Effects of community outreach on members' organizational identity and identification - Statistical Data Included

Administrative Science Quarterly, Sept, 2001 by Caroline A. Bartel

Social comparison. I used a self-report diary method, whereby members reported on their comparisons at a regular, predetermined time (Wood, 1996). The measure is based on Wheeler and Miyake's (1992) Rochester Social Comparison Record (SCR), which provides a more representative and accurate appraisal of social comparisons in natural contexts than indirect assessments that infer comparison activity from observable reactions, such as mood change. While these researchers provided verbal instructions to members about what constitutes a social comparison, for this study I provided a similar set of written instructions adapted from Helgeson and Taylor (1993):

In social situations people sometimes compare themselves with others. This simply involves thinking about information about some person or persons in relation to yourself. For example, this can include thinking about how your family background compares to another person or persons. For the community outreach session you just completed, indicate the extent to which you compared yourself with the following people.

Participants indicated on a 5-point scale (1 = not at all, 5 to a great extent) the extent to which they compared themselves with (1) agency clients and (2) other Pillsbury members. Two items then inquired about the comparison direction for each comparison target. First, participants indicated how they were generally feeling in relation to the person(s) with whom they compared themselves: "I am feeling" inferior or worse off; similar, about the same; or superior or better off. Open-ended questions asked members to describe the nature of the comparisons with agency clients and other organization members, for example, "describe what (if any) inferences, judgments, or observations you made" and "describe what you learned about yourself or the other person(s) today." Second, members reported (later in the survey) their perceived similarity to agency clients and other organization members on a 5-point scale (1 = highly dissimilar, to 5 highly similar). Comparable questions recently appeared in Locke and Nekich's ( 2000) application of the SCR to determine favorable, unfavorable, and neutral social comparisons.

Collective self-esteem. Self-esteem derived from organizational membership was measured with eight items from two subscales of Luhtanen and Crocker's (1992) collective self-esteem scale (see Appendix). These items reflect a member's personal evaluation of the group (private collective self-esteem) as well as his or her assessment of how nonmembers evaluate the group (public collective self-esteem). The original scale was designed to capture a general, cross-group tendency to have a positive social identity. For this study, particular instances of social comparison should affect members' assessments of the value of a specific group rather than his or her total collection of group memberships. Researchers have shown that the scale can be adapted to address a specific group without compromising its psychometric properties (Crocker et al., 1994; Long, Spears, and Manstead, 1994); the items were rephrased accordingly (e.g., "In general, others respect what Pillsbury stands for"). Participants responded to each ite m using a 7-point scale (1 = very inaccurate, 7 = very accurate), which I averaged to create a single collective self-esteem score (Cronbach's [alpha] = .91).