How helping behaviours at work stimulate innovation in the organization: evidence from a moderated-mediation model

ABSTRACT

This study explores the question of whether and how seeking and giving help in a favourable work environment relate to innovation performance at the organisational level. Empirical findings based on 360 employees from four construction sites under a large Chinese multinational organisation showed that help seeking predicted innovation and mediated the relationship between relationship quality and organisation’s innovation performance. Moreover, a higher level of help giving not only improves innovation directly, but also strengthens the positive relationship between help seeking and innovation performance. We also estimated an integrated model to reveal that help giving moderates the mediated relationship between relationship quality and innovation through help seeking channel. This research links relational perspective with creative cognition and componential theory of creativity to clarify how the interaction of help seeking and help giving leads to innovation, and thus contributes to the existing literature by clarifying whether and under what conditions help seeking can be helpful to promote innovation in an organisation. Further theoretical and practical implications along with future research directions are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Relationship quality
• help seeking
• help giving
• innovation
• creative cognition

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Fang Xiaofang and Liu Aisheng, the CEOs of Sinohydro Corporation in Ecuador for their support throughout the data collection process. We are also grateful for Ma Xingwu, the Manager of Administrative Department in CCSC project, Professor Jian-Jun Wang and Yujia Xiao, a PhD Scholar, at Dalian University of Technology, for their inputs and assistance in translating and editing the final version of survey forms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We also examined the cross-loadings criterion to evaluate the discriminant validity. The results showed that each items’ loadings on its own construct is higher than all of its cross loading with other construct. Similarly, the results of common method bias (CMB) revealed that the average of R_a² are substantially greater than their method variances (R_b²) with a ratio of 802.3:1, indicating that CMB is not an issue. We don’t report the results tables here to conserve the space.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the fundamental research funds for central universities under Grant No. DUT19RW207.