Workplace Helping: The Multi-dimensional Structure And Its Influence On The Subsequent Behaviors Of Helpers

How to increase workplace helping is becoming a focus of both management researchers and practitioners.Workplace helping is highly regarded for their positive role in facilitating interpersonal communication and learning,team cohesion and organizational effectiveness.However,while enhancing organizational effectiveness,workplace helping also places a considerable burden on the helpers,and its ’dark side’ effect makes it difficult for organizations to encourage helping in the workplace.Research has constructed the dimensional structure of workplace helping from the perspective of its motivation and content,which is valuable in enriching knowledge in the areas of helpers’ autonomous motivation and helping styles,but neglects the degree of commitment and involvement of helpers to provide different types of helping,making it difficult to explain the real-life contradictions experienced by helpers in helping their colleagues.The dimensional structure of workplace helping needs to be explored from a more diverse perspective to improve the explanatory power to this phenomenon.The multi-dimensional nature of workplace helping may be an inherent source of conflicts between existing theoretical perspectives.To this end,based on previous research,the dimensional structure of workplace helping from the perspective of helper-giving are explored with the methods of Grounded Theory,and the scale is developed and validated following the steps of conceptualization,dimensionality,items generation,scale refinement and validation.On this basis,the model of the influence of workplace helping on their subsequent behaviors from the perspective of the helper is constructed through theoretical reasoning,and empirically tested by structural equation modelling and hierarchical regression analysis with the data from512 questionnaires of Chinese employees collected in a three-wave procedure.The results suggest that:(1)Based on the perspective of helper-giving,workplace helping is an umbrella construct that is multidimensional in nature and can be divided into three types: caring helping,coaching helping and substituting helping.Caring helping emphasizes helper’s concerning,understanding and compassion for the recipient on a psychological and social relational level.Coaching help emphasizes the specific transfer of knowledge and skills from the helper to the recipient.Substituting helping emphasizes excessive sharing of work load by the helper to the recipient.(2)Procedural grounded analysis further revealed that these three helping behaviors have an impact on the subsequent innovative behavior and subsequent deviant behavior of helper,while the psychological condition variables of the helper play a mediating role in these relationships,in which extrinsic career goals play a moderating role as individual motivations.(3)There were significant differences in the direct effects of different types of workplace helping on the two subsequent behaviors of helper.Specifically,there was no significant direct effect of caring helping from the helper on subsequent innovative behavior,but a significant negative effect on subsequent deviant behavior;there was a significant positive effect of coaching helping from the helper on subsequent innovative behavior and a significant negative effect on subsequent deviant behavior;and there was a significant negative effect of substituting helping from the helper on subsequent innovative behavior and a significant positive effect on subsequent deviant behavior.(4)The mediating effects of psychological conditions of work engagement on the relationship between three different types of workplace helping and subsequent behavior of the helper are different.Psychological meaningfulness and citizenship fatigue mediated the process by which workplace helping influenced the subsequent behaviors of the helper,while the mediating effect of psychological safety failed to reach a significant level.Further,psychological meaningfulness and citizenship fatigue partially mediated the relationship between coaching helping and subsequent innovative behavior of the recipient and fully mediated the relationship between coaching helping and subsequent deviant behavior of the recipient;both psychological meaningfulness and citizenship fatigue partially mediated the relationship between substituting helping and subsequent innovative and deviant behavior of the recipient;and neither psychological meaningfulness nor citizenship fatigue mediated the relationship between caring helping and subsequent innovative and deviant behavior of the recipient significantly.(5)Extrinsic career goals moderate the relationship between three workplace helpings of the helper and their psychological conditions of work engagement.Specifically,extrinsic career goals magnify the negative effect of caring helping on psychological meaningfulness and psychological safety,but reduce the negative effect of caring helping on citizenship fatigue;extrinsic career goals reinforce the positive effect of coaching helping on psychological meaningfulness and reduce the negative effect of coaching helping on citizenship fatigue,but do not have a significant moderating effect on the relationship between coaching helping and psychological safety;extrinsic career goals magnify the negative effect of substituting helping on psychological meaningfulness and psychological safety and reinforce the positive effect of substituting helping on citizenship fatigue.The theoretical contribution of the results is that:(1)The multidimensional nature of workplace helping is proposed and tested based on a helper-giving perspective,providing a new categorical perspective and dimensional structure to explain the conflicting views of existing research on the effects of workplace helping.(2)The differential effects of the three types of helping:caring,coaching and substituting,on the subsequent innovative and deviant behaviors of the helper elaborate the effects of workplace helping,clarifies the specific sources and mediating mechanisms of the "bright side" and "dark side" effects of workplace helping,and provides a useful relational conceptual framework for understanding and appreciating the complex impact processes of workplace helping.(3)The differences in the moderating mechanisms of caring,coaching,and substituting helping on psychological conditions were revealed.The idiographic nature of resource is confirmed in resource effects,the differences between resource idiographic nature in the process of resource evaluation and resource effects are clarified.