When Good Deeds Hurt: The Potential Costs of Interpersonal Helping and the Moderating Roles of Impression Management and Prosocial Values Motives

Abstract

Drawing on the conservation of resource theory, the current study builds and tests a moderated-mediation model that explores the potential costs of engaging in interpersonal helping—a common type of organizational citizenship behavior. Specifically, this research argues that interpersonal helping induces emotional exhaustion, which adversely affects task performance. The study also examines impression management and prosocial values motives as conditional moderators among these relationships. Using multisource field data across two time periods, results suggest that an impression management motive is likely to strengthen the proposed relationships, whereas a prosocial values motive is likely to weaken them. Theoretical and practical implications as well as future research avenues are also discussed.