By integrating conservation of resources and social comparison perspectives, we seek to investigate how employees’ own i-deals, independently from and jointly with their coworker’s i-deals, determine their emotional exhaustion and subsequent deviant behaviors. We conducted a field study focusing on task i-deals, and used Actor–Partner Interdependence Model and polynomial regression to test the hypotheses. We found that emotional exhaustion not only mediated the negative relationship between employees’ own task i-deals and deviant behaviors, but also mediated the positive relationship between upward (...) social comparison of task i-deals and deviant behaviors. These results demonstrated the intra- and interpersonal implications of task i-deals for emotional exhaustion and subsequent deviant behaviors. The current research not only shifts the attention from a predominantly positive view on i-deals to a more balanced and nuanced view on i-deals’ implications, but also sheds light on the interpersonal nature of i-deals and the emotional exhaustion implication of upward social comparison. (shrink)

PurposeAs a new human resource management practice, idiosyncratic deals are personalized employment arrangements negotiated between employees and employers and intended to benefit them both. It plays an important role in attracting, retaining and motivating employees to promote breakthrough innovation. Based on the input-process-output model, this paper examines the relationship between team idiosyncratic deals and team breakthrough innovation, the mediating role of team exploratory-exploitative knowledge sharing, and the moderating roles of team transactive memory systems and team cognitive flexibility.Participants and methodsIn order (...) to reduce the effects of common method biases and causal lag effect, this study is divided into three stages for data collection, with a time interval of 1 month. Eighty teams from six enterprises in Shanghai and Hangzhou were selected as samples, and the hypothesis test was carried out by hierarchical regression analysis, bootstrap, and Johnson-Neyman method.ResultsThe results show that higher team idiosyncratic deals are associated with higher team breakthrough innovation through higher team exploratory-exploitative knowledge sharing, and that team transactive memory systems and team cognitive flexibility positively moderate the mediating effect of team exploratory-exploitative knowledge sharing in the relationship between team idiosyncratic deals and team breakthrough innovation in the first stage and the second stage, respectively. Under the joint effect of high team transactive memory systems and high team cognitive flexibility, the mediating effect of team exploratory-exploitative knowledge sharing is stronger.ConclusionThe research results break through the previous research framework of social exchange theory, and I-P-O model to explore the influence mechanism of team idiosyncratic deals, in order to promote the sustainable growth of team breakthrough innovation through this non-standard work arrangement. It is hoped that this research can inspire modern enterprises to create team idiosyncratic deals for valuable teams engaged in breakthrough innovation, which are more conducive to give full play to their heterogeneous talents, and finally help enterprises break through the industry bottleneck and win the market competition. (shrink)