Interpersonal helping in the workplace: social expectation predicts anticipated guilt and intention to help a coworker

ABSTRACT

Promoting interpersonal helping among coworkers is an important aim for any organisation that cares about employee well-being. Drawing on guilt aversion hypothesis, this research focuses on the power of social expectations in promoting prosocial behaviour among employees and investigates the role of anticipated guilt for failing to meet coworkers’ expectations. In two preregistered studies, the effect of beneficiary expectation on benefactors’ anticipated guilt and intention to help was investigated. In Study 1, Japanese participants (n = 284) recalled a situation when they helped a coworker spontaneously, and evaluated perceived beneficiary expectation to receive help, as well as anticipated guilt for not helping. Beneficiary expectation positively predicted anticipated guilt, and the effect was stronger when the beneficiary was a same-status colleague, and when interpersonal helping frequency in the organisation was low. Study 2 (n = 499) employed vignettes and manipulated beneficiary expectation. A mediational model revealed that beneficiary expectation leads to more anticipated guilt for not helping, which, in turn, increases employees’ intention to help. Together, these studies show that employees are sensitive to their coworkers’ expectations, and guilt-averse; therefore, interpersonal helping among employees may be promoted by establishing legitimate expectations of prosociality in the workplace.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpersonal helping
• prosocial behaviour
• organisational citizenship behaviour
• social expectation
• guilt aversion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data, materials, and code are available from the author upon request.

Notes

1 The pre-registration mistakenly indicated that the association between expectation and guilt would be stronger for participants ‘high’ in relational mobility. The correct word should have been ‘low’.

2 The pre-registered sample size is 300, but 305 responses were actually collected. Although 300 participants were recruited and paid for participation on the crowdsourcing platform, five additional participants responded to the questionnaire but did not submit their participation code for payment. Therefore, the initial sample size slightly exceeded the pre-registered sample size. A priori power analysis was not conducted. A post-hoc power analysis revealed that, considering the final sample size (N = 284), and an alpha level of 0.05, the study had 99% power to detect a medium effect (f² = 0.15) of social expectation on guilt in a simple regression.

3 The pre-registered sample size is 500, but 503 responses were collected. Similar to Study 1, three participants responded to the questionnaire but did not submit their participation code for payment. A priori power analysis was not conducted. However, the sample size exceeded the multilevel-modelling power recommendations (30-50 Level-2 observations; Maas & Hox, 2005).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, under Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists [grant number 22K13791].