Developing and Testing a Model of Dynamic Changes in Work-School Conflict and Workplace Deviance Over Time

Work-school conflict is a major stressor for many college students who have paid jobs while in college. Although work-school conflict experience is dynamic, the extant research has predominantly cast it and its consequences as between-person phenomena from a static perspective, ignoring its inherent temporal nature. As a result, little is known about the intra-individual changes in work-school conflict and their associated consequences as implied by the related theory. Drawing on the stressor-emotion model of counterproductive work behavior, we conducted a longitudinal weekly diary study to examine how work-school conflict change can predict changes in negative emotions and workplace deviance (i.e., the change-to-change effects). We also tested core self-evaluation, time management skill, and financial well-being as moderators of the proposed mediated relationship. Results from latent change score modeling showed that upward work-school conflict change had a positive relationship with upward workplace deviance change via upward changes in negative emotions. Further, time management skill and financial well-being weakened the indirect relationships between upward work-school conflict change and upward workplace deviance change. However, the moderating nature of core self-evaluation on the indirect relationship contrasted with our hypothesis. Implications for theory and future research are discussed along with implications for organizations and college institutions.