Antecedents of a tendency to become overinvolved

The purpose of this study is to analyze motivational factors that influence a tendency to become overinvolved, and the impact of this propensity on students’ stress. Research suggests overcommitment and overinvolvement contribute to increased stress among college students (Porru et al., 2021). The relationship between overcommitment and stress is related to effort/reward imbalances, where a greater perceived imbalance is also associated with greater distress (Feuerhahn et al., 2012; Siegrist and Li, 2016). The effort/reward imbalance model has been expanded to undergraduate populations in the proposed Undergraduate Student Overcommitment Model, where students are thought to seek approval through effort and delayed rewards (Adam, 2021). This theoretical model posits that student effort is shaped by a cyclical process where students’ effort shapes whether they receive approval and delayed rewards, which in turn impacts future effort. Drawing on 4-year longitudinal data from a larger college‐student cohort (N = 1,473), the present study suggests that internal and external motivators influence students’ tendency to become overinvolved, which has implications for student effort and behavior. We propose the internal factors that drive overinvolvement are intrinsic motivation for challenge seeking and coping by distraction; external factors are related to students’ desire to gain approval and can include parental expectations/pressures and a desire to appear competent to others.