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The Relational Antecedents of Interpersonal Helping: ‘Quantity’, ‘Quality’ or Both?
Author(s) -
Stea Diego,
Pedersen Torben,
Foss Nicolai J.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
british journal of management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.407
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 1467-8551
pISSN - 1045-3172
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8551.12176
Subject(s) - quality (philosophy) , interpersonal communication , psychology , cognition , position (finance) , social psychology , id, ego and super ego , relation (database) , interpersonal relationship , marketing , business , public relations , computer science , political science , philosophy , epistemology , finance , database , neuroscience
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. Employees with large networks are therefore expected to 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 inverted U‐shaped relation between the size of an ego's social network and engagement in helping behaviour. However, high‐quality relationships imply higher mutual understanding between the actors, 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 difficulties that may arise from having large social networks.