Helping Behavior At The Workplace:the Influence Of Group-level Climate And Communicative Openness

Helping behavior at the workplace as a dimension of organizational citizenship behavior(OCB) is an important concept in the research field of organizational behavior in recent years. Existing empirical research on OCB proved that it is the organization’s lubricant, might play a positive role in promoting and improving the outcome and performance of the outcome and performance of the organization, and could also reduce the friction and increase the efficiency of the organization. With the increasingly importance of team based work units, the nature of the work among the members also tend to be more and more dependent, the advantage of mutual-help team also gradually highlights. The attention of domestic for helping behavior, however, still more to stay in the field of school education and social moral education, lacking research of how to promote individual helping behavior at the workplace. And the front research on helping behavior always take the individual’s personality as the main factors that influence the helping behavior. The research on how to help group members to build a high level of helping behavior from the perspective of organization is relatively little. Actually, the effects from group-level may have great influence on individual helping behavior. Social dilemma is a kind of a selection dilemma between individual and group, namely the individual conflict between short-term self-interests and group long-term phenomenon. It emphasizes the importance of group climate and communication. Therefore, under the background of the theory and practice, the research of helping behavior at the workplace and group level antecedents must have its important meaning.This research firstly made a literal review of helping behavior research status at home and abroad, analyzed the mutual relations between helping behavior and social dilemmas, and from the angle of social dilemma to explain helping behavior, established a mechanism for the influence on individual helping behavior of group level factors. In addition, present helping behavior study highlights the relationship between the multilevel, this research also made an analysis of cross-layer influence mechanism. Then, according to social exchange theory and social information processing theory, we took two characteristics of group-level helping climate and communication openness as individual helping behavior’s prediction variables, built the mechanism model of group situation and individual helping behavior, put forward the corresponding research hypothesis. Secondly, building on a social dilemma analysis of four types of peer responses helping behavior to low-performing team members, as compensating for, training, motivating, and rejecting, this paper identified the group-level helping climate and group communicative openness that are likely to predict group members’ willingness to engage in four kind of helping behavior. What’s more, this research also supposed that group communicative openness as a group characteristic may moderate the relationship between the group-level helping climate and individual helping behavior. Through two rounds of 66 nurses team match data, using the social exchange theory and social information processing theory, we tested the effect of helping climate on the members’ workplace behavior by making a hierarchical linear modeling, using SPSS19.0 and HLM7.0.The empirical results showed that both group-level helping climate and communicative openness have a significant effect on individual helping behavior, and the moderate effect of communicative openness between helping climate and individual member’s training and rejecting behavior to low-performing team members also exist. Finally, this paper gave some advice to the future researchers and enterprises, that future research should pay more attention to combine both economic theory and management theory to explain the phenomenon occurred in the workplace. Groups should be aware of the importance of group-level helping climate and communicative openness, and make efforts to foster the climate and bulid the communication mechanism.