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The study was intended to find out if there was a difference between reactive and proactive helping in terms of developing wellbeing.

There were two studies. Study One involved doing interviews with employees in Chinese businesses, then creating a scale that was used to test a series of hypotheses in Study Two.

The results showed that proactive helping behavior has a significantly positive effect on employees’ well-being. But the coefficients of reactive helping behavior toward work well-being were not significant. Finally, the results showed the significant effect of meaningfulness as a mediator for employees’ wellbeing for both proactive and reactive helping.

The authors felt their research had practical implications for both employees and managers. Specifically, their insights into the nature of different forms of helping could help them manage their careers. Many previous research papers have shown that those who help others are more likely to have successful careers. But the paper suggests that employees who help proactively may gain much more benefit than those helping reactively.

Multiple forces that shape the identities of adolescents and young adults also influence their subsequent career choices. Early work experiences are key among these forces. Recognizing this, youth service programs have emerged worldwide with the hope of shaping participants’ future trajectories through boosting engagement in civically oriented activities and work. Despite these goals, past research on these programs’ impact has yielded mixed outcomes. Our goal is to understand why this might be the case.

We rely on interview, archival, and longitudinal survey data to examine young adults’ experiences of a European youth service program.

A core feature of youth service programs, namely their dual identity of helping others (i.e., service beneficiaries) and helping oneself (i.e., participants), might partly explain the program’s mixed outcomes. We find that participants focus on one of the organization’s identities largely to the exclusion of the other, creating a dynamic in which their interactions with members who focus on the other identity create challenges and dominate their program experience, to the detriment of a focus on the organization and its goals. This suggests that a previously overlooked feature of youth service programs (i.e., their dual identity) might prove both a blessing for attracting many diverse members and a curse for achieving desired outcomes.

More broadly, our results suggest that dual identity organizations might attract members focused on a select identity, but fail to imbue them with a blended identity; thus, limiting the extent to which such organizations can truly “redirect” future career choices.

The main purpose of our study is to investigate the impact of daily leader humor behaviors on healthcare workers’ daily psychological state and behavioral outcomes.

Based on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study proposes that daily leader humor behaviors are positively related to healthcare workers’ daily positive affect, which in turn affects their next-day helping behaviors towards patients. These predictions hinge on healthcare workers’ difficulty in maintaining display rules. We conducted a lagged experience sampling methodology (ESM) survey of 621 complete daily observations from 93 healthcare workers who work in direct contact with patients at a large public hospital in China across consecutive 10 working days.

Results of multilevel path analysis demonstrate that daily leader humor behaviors are positively related to healthcare workers’ same-day positive affect, and this positive affect enhances their next-day helping behaviors towards patients. Furthermore, healthcare workers’ higher difficulty in maintaining display rules attenuates the benefits of daily leader humor behaviors.

Building on the COR theory and adopting a diary research design, this study shows daily fluctuations in leader humor behaviors and proposes a mechanism through which daily leader humor behaviors indirectly affect healthcare workers’ next-day helping behaviors. Thus, our study disclosed possible means for healthcare organizations to improve service quality.

The purpose of this research is to examine how a change in team dynamics impacts an individual's motivation to engage in helping behavior and operational performance.

An online vignette experiment and a hybrid discrete event and agent-based simulation model are used.

Study findings demonstrate how a non-core worker's perception of team dynamics influence engagement in helping behavior and system performance.

This study provides a further understanding on how team members react to changes in team processes. This study theorizes on how an individual team member responds to fairness concerns. This study also advances our understanding of the critical importance of helping behavior in a retail logistics setting. This research illustrates how the theory of strategic core and procedural justice literature can be adopted to explain team dynamics in supply chain management.

This study aims to examine the factors that influence hotel/motel employees’ helping behavior toward the victims of human trafficking.

Using a survey-based quantitative method, this study examines and compares two models of helping behavior based on egoism and altruism theories to measure the helping tendencies of lodging employees toward victims of human trafficking.

The study results show that perceived intrinsic rewards of helping and empathy with the victims are the major antecedents of employees’ likelihood to help the victims.

The study contributed to the egoism school of thought and the Cost-Reward Model by showing that only perceived intrinsic rewards drive individuals’ intention to help in risky covert situations, such as human trafficking, while perceived extrinsic rewards may demotivate people to help in these situations.

Previous studies overlooked the role of the lodging industry in human trafficking. This study focuses on service employees as potential helpers of the victims as they notice in hotels/motels.

This study, based on the conservation of resource theory, aims to investigate the negative impacts of abusive supervision on helping behaviors among employees by examining the mediating role of rumination and the moderating role of psychological flexibility.

A total sample of 282 reliable questionnaires are collected from 282 employees working in education and banking sectors of Pakistan. SPSS and AMOS are used for data analysis of the proposed model.

The findings reveal that rumination mediates the relationship between abusive supervision and employees’ helping behavior. In addition, the results show that higher levels of psychological flexibility negatively moderate the relationship between abusive supervision and employees’ helping behaviors through mediation.

This study elucidates how and when abusive supervision deters helping behavior among employees and provides useful guidelines for banking/university’s administration to understand harmful consequences of abusive supervision and take appropriate policy measures to lessen their harmful effects upon employees.

By proposing a moderated mediation model, this study discovers rumination as a key mediator that links abusive supervision to employees’ helping behaviors and identifies the role of psychological flexibility in diminishing the negative impacts of abusive supervision upon employees’ helping behaviors through rumination.

Drawing on the self-cognitive theory, this study aims to propose a conceptual model that links customer mistreatment with different types of helping behaviors through the self-efficacy mechanism.

The empirical analysis made use of the original data of three hotels located in southern China. The authors tested the hypotheses with a three-wave survey of a sample of 430 frontline workers in 95 groups.

Customer mistreatment may reduce employees’ self-efficacy, which has both positive and negative effects depending on the type of helping. Moreover, the coworkers’ supporting climate buffered the influence of self-efficacy on autonomous and dependent helping.

The authors resolve the ambiguity surrounding customer mistreatment-helping and self-efficacy-helping relations. Thus, the authors extend the knowledge on the influence of customer mistreatment and self-efficacy on helping behaviors by establishing that both positive and negative effects may exist depending on the type of helping. Moreover, this study identifies the predictive role of self-efficacy in autonomous and dependent helping.

Drawing on the work-home resources (W-HR) model, this study examines the ripple effects of proactive helping behavior at work on helpers' family relationship quality at home via positive affect and work-family interpersonal capitalization, and tests the moderating role of independent self-construal in the resource spillover process.

Using an experience sampling methodology, data was collected (N = 382) from multiple sources in five consecutive working days. Multilevel path modeling was used to examine the hypotheses.

The results indicated that proactive helping other at work can generate affective resources for helpers, which in turn triggers them to share daily work experiences and feelings with their spouses at home, and strengthens their family relationship quality. Moreover, the effects of helping others on family relationship quality were more pronounced for helpers with relatively high independent self-construal.

The findings explore the enrichment effects and unintended family-related distal outcomes of helping behaviors for helpers, and contributes to the W-HR model by uncovering an affective-behavioral ripple mechanism linking work and family. Finally, our results identify the boundary condition, that proactive helping behaviors are more rewarding for helpers with higher independent self-construal.

Building on trait activation theory, theory of other orientation, and self-perception theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine how employees’ perceptions of helping efficacy and instrumentality influence the relationship between their prosocial motive and helping behavior.

Data from 304 supervisor-subordinate dyads in South Korea were analyzed. Hypotheses were tested using hierarchical multiple regression.

The results show that prosocial motive had a stronger positive influence on helping behavior among employees with high levels of helping efficacy. However, contrary to our expectation, prosocial motive was more positively related to helping behavior when employees had high levels of helping instrumentality.

Organizations need to present employees with effective, standardized work procedures to make them feel efficacy in helping others. It is also necessary for organizations to consider helping behavior an important factor in performance evaluation and to signify to employees that helping behavior will be rewarded.

Helping behavior is critical for the effectiveness of both organizations and society at large; voluntarily helping people can enhance various kinds of performance at the societal level and can contribute to people’s welfare. Thus, it is necessary to teach people how to help others and to recognize helping behavior.

This study contributes to the understanding of when the influence of prosocial motive on helping is more strongly activated by incorporating employees’ perceptions of the contexts in which helping behavior operates – efficacy and instrumentality.

Utilizing transaction cost economics (TCE) theory as the theoretical underpinning, this article aims to describe the costs of interpersonal helping and governing mechanisms that individuals may use to alleviate helping costs.

A theoretical analysis was performed by drawing upon TCE and related research.

Through the lens of TCE, the authors propose the following: First, as the costs of helping increase, interpersonal helping shifts from being triggered by an autonomous motivation to being regulated by contextual contingencies. Second, the helper is likely to utilize reciprocity to mitigate helping costs by acquiring specific assets possessed by the recipient when asset specificity is high. Third, the helper is likely to utilize organizationally sanctioned procedures and rules to mitigate helping costs by eliminating unwanted resource consumptions when outcome uncertainty is high. Finally, the helper is likely to utilize group norms to mitigate helping costs by involving others in helping or discouraging requests for recurrent help when the frequency of helping is high.

From a theoretical standpoint, this article complements previous research that focuses on the dark side of interpersonal helping. Practically, the authors offer several implications that help managers minimize the costs of helping in the organization.