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

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.