When Given a Fish vs. Offered a Fishing Rod: Outcomes of Receiving Contrasting Types of Help

Abstract

In today’s fast paced, collaborative workplace cultures, it is hard for employees to not receive help and succeed alone. Thus, giving and receiving help is omnipresent in organizations. However, receiving help has proven to be both beneficial and harmful concurrently. To reconcile these conflicting outcomes of receiving help, we adopt a dual-type view of helping. We propose that employees who receive dependency help (i.e., where a leader fixes a problem on behalf of an employee or presents a final answer) report lower job satisfaction and higher turnover intention. In contrast, employees who receive autonomy help (i.e., where a leader guides an employee through the steps on how to fix a problem) report higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intention. We further invoke Self-Determination Theory to examine the mediating role of employees’ needs for perceived impact, sense of belongingness, and occupational self-efficacy in predicting divergent outcomes. Finally, we examine the moderating role of leader-employee relationships in elucidating how high-quality LMX can buffer against the negative effects of receiving dependency help. We test our hypotheses using a combination of experimental studies and a large field study comprising of 73 supervisors and 292 employees. In doing so, this research highlights how receiving contrasting types of help can yield divergent outcomes.