The Relational Antecedents of Interpersonal Helping: ‘Quantity’, ‘Quality’ or Both?

Date01 April 2017
Published date01 April 2017
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12176
British Journal of Management, Vol. 28, 197–212 (2017)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12176
The Relational Antecedents of Interpersonal
Helping: ‘Quantity’, ‘Quality’ or Both?
Diego Stea, Torben Pedersen1and Nicolai J. Foss1
Copenhagen Business School, Department of Strategic Management and Globalization, Kilevej14,
2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark, and 1Bocconi University, Department of Management and Technology,
Via Roentgen 1, 20136 Milan, Italy
Corresponding author email: ds.smg@cbs.dk
Having a large network of colleagues means having several opportunities to help those
colleagues, as well as a higher chance of receiving requests for help from them. Employ-
ees with large networks are therefore expectedto help more in the workplace than those
with small networks. However, large networks are also associated with cognitive costs,
which may reduce the focal employee’s ability to both recognize the need for help and
engage in helping behaviours. For these reasons, the authors assert an invertedU-shaped
relation between the size of an ego’ssocial network and engagement in helping behaviour.
However, high-quality relationships imply higher mutual understanding between the ac-
tors, and hence lower cognitive costs. In turn, the position (and threshold) of the curve
between network size and interpersonal helping should be influenced by the quality of
the relationship between the provider and the beneficiaries of help.Analysis of employee-
level, single-firm data supports these ideas, providing preliminary evidence that quality
of relationship compensates for the diculties that may arise from having large social
networks.
Introduction
Within an organization, employees often engage
in behaviours that are helpful to colleagues: for
example, by supplying information to those who
have been absent or are to engage in a new task, or
oering assistance to those with heavy workloads
(Podsako et al., 2000; Van Der Vegt, Bunderson
and Oosterhof, 2006; VanDyne and LePine, 1998).
Such interpersonal helping in the workplace is im-
portant for the eective functioning of the orga-
nization. It preserves relationships and enhances
team spirit and cohesiveness, leading to improved
communication and coordination,and overall per-
formance (Podsako et al., 2000; Van Dyne and
LePine, 1998). It is one of the factors that allow
firms to prosper, expand and grow.
Research has been investigating which factors
may favour the emergence of interpersonal help-
ing in organizations (Grant, 2007; LePine and Van
Dyne, 2001; Moorman, Blakelyand Nieho, 1998;
Settoon, Bennett and Liden, 1996; Van Der Vegt
et al., 2006). Such research has identified dier-
ent types of antecedents, in particular, the indi-
vidual attributes of actors, situational variables
and task-related variables (Podsako et al., 2000).
More recently, research has also addressed the re-
lational aspects of interpersonal helping (Bowler
and Brass, 2006; Grant, 2007; Settoon and Mossh-
older, 2002; Venkataramani and Dalal, 2007;
Wilson, 2000). This research has producedtwo im-
portant insights. First, employeeshelp more if they
are in contact with a large number of colleagues
(Amato, 1990; Settoon and Mossholder, 2002)
and, second, employees are more helpful to those
colleagues with whom they have high-quality re-
lationships (Anderson and Williams, 1996; Bowler
and Brass, 2006; Venkataramani and Dalal, 2007).
Both eects have been depicted as linear, implying
that helping behaviourincreases without limit with
the quantity and quality of network relationships
(Bowler and Brass,2006; Settoon and Mossholder,
© 2016 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
198 D. Stea, T. Pedersen and N. J. Foss
2002; Venkataramani and Dalal, 2007). Potential
interactions have not been explored, which, we ar-
gue, represents a gap in the literature.
Other research suggests that having a large net-
work of contacts may also introduce important
cognitive challenges (McFadyen and Cannella,
2004). Bounded rational agents have limited at-
tention resources to allocate across their contacts
and dedicate to the behaviours they engage in
(Ocasio, 1997). Thus, whilelarge networks provide
opportunities for engaging in interpersonal help-
ing, the complexity associated with such networks
also imposes cognitive costs of various kinds. This
can make helping more dicult for focal employ-
ees. Not only will they have to spread their help-
ing behaviour across more, perhaps less familiar,
colleagues, the resulting complexity will also rep-
resent a challenge to their (fixed amount of) atten-
tion. The drain on attention comes about not just
in the process of actually helping a colleague, but
also in the process of trying to understand whatthe
colleague’s problem is.
Thus, for employees with many network ties,
at some point an additional network tie may re-
sult in decreasing helping behaviour on the mar-
gin. In fact, it is conceivable that focal employ-
ees become so overwhelmed by the complexity
inherent in a large (and expanding) network of
colleagues that their helping behaviour may even
drop. Declining helping behaviour (on the margin
and absolutely) may put a brake on the expan-
sion and performance of firms, whichshould there-
fore have an interest in osetting these negative
eects.
However, a close relationship between the
provider and the beneficiaries of help may play
a fundamental role in reducing cognitive costs in
the face of complexity. A close relationship implies
high mutual understanding between colleagues. A
provider of help can, for example, recognize better
when a colleague needs help and what type of help
he or she may need. A beneficiary of help is thus
better able to target a relevant provider of help.
Firms can increase the closeness of relationship be-
tween colleagues: for example, by setting up men-
toring and team-building programmes.
These arguments are novel to the literature on
the relation between network size and interper-
sonal helping, which implies that we have an in-
complete view of the relational antecedents of
helping. For example, we do not know whether
firms will experience a penalty in terms of reduced
helping behaviour as their size increases and em-
ployee networks also increase, and whether they
can at least partially oset this penalty byinvesting
in relationship quality. To address these gaps, we
pose two related questions: Is there a point where
a unit increment of the size of the network leads
to zero additional helping? How is the relation be-
tween the size of employees’ networksand their en-
gagement in interpersonal helping aected by the
quality of their work relationships?
We address these questions by theorizing and
testing the interaction eect of network size and
relationship closeness on interpersonal helping in
the workplace. We argue that small networks pro-
vide few opportunities for helping, whereas large
networks may overload focal employees with an
excessive amount of information, reducing their
recognition of the various needs to engage in in-
terpersonal helping. Thus, we hypothesize that the
relation between network size and interpersonal
helping has a curvilinear (inverted-U) shape. We
also argue that this relation is moderated by re-
lationship closeness, because the latter allows in-
dividuals more accurately to ascertain colleagues’
need for help. Empirically, there is an endogene-
ity challenge represented by the fact that helping
and closeness are mutually reinforcing. Our data
do not allow us to handle this problem directly.
This calls for caution in interpreting our analy-
sis, results that otherwise do not contradict our
hypotheses.
In sum, we add to previous studies that use a
social network approach to examine the impor-
tance of dyadic and relational characteristics for
interpersonal helping (Bowler and Brass, 2006;
Venkataramani and Dalal, 2007). Specifically, by
taking the cognitive costs of large networks into
account, we cast new light on how network size
links to interpersonal helping in the workplace.
Moreover, we introduce relationship quality as an
important contingency for the realization of the
helping potential of large networks. By highlight-
ing the importance of relationship quality as an
element that helps firms and their employees to
cope with the cognitive costs of large networks,
we proer new theory on the complementary na-
ture of the structural (network size) and qualita-
tive (relationship closeness) element (Settoon and
Mossholder, 2002) of the relational antecedents of
helping.
© 2016 British Academy of Management.

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