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From Helping to Helpful: a Social Network Examination of Workplace Helpfulness at Multiple Levels

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Abstract

Moving beyond the current emphasis on the frequency of helping, this study aims to emphasize the importance of help quality. Utilizing a social network design, this study incorporates both the help provider’s and recipient’s perspectives and develops a multilevel model to demonstrate the incremental validity of help quality over frequency in the prediction of key organizational outcomes (i.e., satisfaction and performance at both individual and team levels). We further identify servant leadership as a crucial predictor of help quality, more so than help frequency, at both levels. Data were collected from 416 nurses and 42 supervisors from a large hospital in Beijing, China. Results show that help quality significantly predicted the supervisor-rated performance of the help provider, the job satisfaction of the help recipient, and team satisfaction, after controlling for the effects of help frequency. Contrary to our expectations, help quality did not significantly predict team performance. Moreover, servant leadership was a stronger predictor of help quality than of help frequency at both individual and team levels. Our results suggest that organizations and managers should aim to cultivate employee helpfulness, instead of merely encouraging more helping behavior. Avenues for future research are discussed.

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Notes

  1. The time interval of 2 months was requested by the organization from which data were collected.

  2. In this study, we used recipients’ subjective evaluations of helpfulness as an operationalization of help quality. Correspondingly, we used scale anchors that ranged from “1 = very unhelpful” to “5 = very helpful” so that the full range of helpfulness can be captured. Although these two terms were used interchangeably in this manuscript, it is worth noting that the “low-high” range of help quality may not exactly match the “very unhelpful-very helpful” range of helpfulness, as recipients may perceive some help that is of low quality (e.g., incomplete information; Gray et al., 2020) as “a little helpful” instead of “unhelpful.” We want to note this important distinction, as low-quality help may only partially define unhelpful helping, and acknowledge that help quality may also be operationalized differently (e.g., reactive versus proactive helping, Spitzmuller & Van Dyne, 2013; appreciation, Lee et al., 2019).

  3. We note that not all social network ratings fall under the performance appraisal domain and therefore not all rater trainings are relevant. Even so, some universal rules and best practices for ensuring rating consistency may still be beneficial.

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Author information

Author notes

  1. Jose M. Cortina and Yimin He contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Deakin University, Burwood, Australia

    Zitong Sheng

  2. Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA

    Andra Serban & Jose M. Cortina

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, USA

    Yimin He

  4. School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Xiang Yao

Authors
  1. Zitong Sheng
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  2. Andra Serban
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  3. Jose M. Cortina
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  4. Yimin He
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  5. Xiang Yao
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Correspondence to Xiang Yao.

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Appendix. Data transparency

Appendix. Data transparency

A previous version of the current manuscript has been presented at the Academy of Management (AOM) Conference but has not been published anywhere else.

The data reported in this manuscript have not been previously published. Besides the current manuscript (denoted MS1 below), some variables from this dataset are used as part of another manuscript that is currently under review at another journal (denoted MS2 below). MS2 is a two-study manuscript that includes a separate dataset besides the current dataset. No other study is planned based on this dataset. MS1 (current) includes variables of helping behavior frequency, helping behavior quality, job satisfaction, servant leadership, supervisor-rated task performance, and team performance. MS2 (under review) includes variables of servant leadership, altruistic motivation, safety motivation, safety climate, and safety performance. The only overlap between the two manuscripts is one variable (i.e., servant leadership) and control variables (gender, organizational tenure). The table below displays in detail what variables are used in the current manuscript (MS1) and the other manuscript (MS2).

Variables included

MS1 (status = current)

MS2 (status = under review)

Main variables

  

Helping frequency

X

 

Helping quality

X

 

Team performance (objective)

X

 

Job satisfaction

X

 

Task performance (supervisor-rated)

X

 

Servant leadership

X

X

Safety performance (supervisor-rated)

 

X

Safety motivation

 

X

Altruistic motivation

 

X

Safety climate

 

X

Control variables

  

Gender

X

X

Work tenure

X

X

Team size

X

X

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Sheng, Z., Serban, A., Cortina, J.M. et al. From Helping to Helpful: a Social Network Examination of Workplace Helpfulness at Multiple Levels. J Bus Psychol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-023-09923-6

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