Helping in Organizations: A Review and Directions for Future Research
Helping has long been a central component of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and yet our knowledge of the full spectrum of helping processes in organizations is limited. Most helping research in the OCB literature has focused on individuals’ tendencies to help across situations, including antecedents and outcomes of those general tendencies. Integrating across a number of related literatures on such topics as prosocial behavior, help seeking, feedback/advice seeking, and favor exchange, this chapter presents an integrative framework of helping processes organized around the key decisions of whether to seek help and whether to help when asked, as well as whether to offer help and whether to accept offered help. An exploration of the factors associated with these decisions identifies a number of topics that have not received full attention in the OCB literature, which can be studied across various types of help and levels of analysis.