Does formalising help at work lower its quality? 

Every employee has a specified job to do, whether carpentry at a housebuilding site or medical research in a library. But is helping fellow employees part of one’s job? And, more specifically, should such helping be part of an organisation’s formal human resources (HR) policy as reflected in performance assessments that can affect promotion and pay? 

That’s the topic of research from Cambridge Judge Business School, which examines previous studies in this area and then develops a practical-application model that weighs the pros and cons of a formal HR policy on workplace helping. 

The effect of formalised HR policies 

The research by Yingyue (Luna) Luan (MPhil in Strategy, Marketing and Operations 2018), a PhD candidate at Cambridge Judge, and Yeun Joon Kim, Associate Professor in Organisational Behaviour at the Business School, finds that formalised HR helping policies increase self-promoting motivation for helping but decrease intrinsic or non-self-interested motivation for helping. 

The effect is to increase the frequency of helping while decreasing the quality of helping, and the research also finds that supervisors in conducting annual performance assessments rely heavily on such helping frequency while not factoring in helping quality. 

“We find that at firms that have a formal HR policy of helping, supervisors rely excessively on the frequency of helping as that is most visible, but they fail to take account of the less-visible quality component of helping,” says Luna. 

“This ties into the fact that employees with a strong self-promoting motivation for helping concentrate on enhancing their own image in the eyes of supervisors. They therefore may pay less attention to whether others are really being helped, and may deliberately provide the minimum effort in each helping episode to maximise the visible frequency of helping,” adds Joon. 

The research won the award for Best Paper with Practical Implications for Management from the Organisational Behaviour Division of the Academy of Management at the group’s 2024 annual convention in Chicago. 

The research is based on 2 studies: an online exercise involving 133 participants who were instructed to imagine themselves as employees in the HR team of a steel company where colleagues were facing challenges and needed help, and a one-year field experiment involving 667 employees across 149 research and development teams at a chemical company in East Asia. 

Investigating the efficacy of formal HR policies in supporting others

Helping is defined, the research says, as “prosocial, promoting, and co-operative behaviors intended to benefit others – actions that foster interpersonal harmony, facilitate task completion, and build and maintain relationship.” While helping has generally been seen as an extra-role behaviour outside of ordinary job expectations, previous research has shown the beneficial effects of helping on both help-givers and help-recipients. 

So the research by Luna and Joon examines not whether helping is beneficial, but rather the effectiveness of formalised helping in HR policies that include employee helping in job descriptions to be included in performance evaluations – which the researchers refer to as “helping-inclusive HR practice”. 

“Our research is the first to propose a comprehensive theoretical model to theorise and test the effects of the formalised helping,” the authors say. “We develop a balanced model that includes both the benefits and the drawbacks of the formalisation of helping with respect to the quality and frequency of helping.” 

When formal policies get in the way of our natural desire to help 

Prior research has shown that employees with high levels of intrinsic motivation for helping have a strong desire to assist co-workers who are struggling with their jobs, as such helping satisfies human needs for competence, social relationships and autonomy. However, such intrinsic motivation decreases when helping becomes a direct part of job descriptions, partly because it weakens the autonomy factor that inspired intrinsic motivation for helping. 

“As a helping-inclusive HR practice stipulates that the act of helping is monitored, evaluated, and rewarded formally, the motivational foundation for helping may shift from a self-rewarding mechanism to a mechanism that is more tactical and constrained by explicit requirements,” says the research by Luna and Joon.

Is there a trade-off between frequency and quality of helping colleagues? 

The authors also look at some of the logistics of helping, including the tradeoff between frequency and quality, as reflected in some of the interviews conducted in their field study. 

“Helping my colleagues to find causes of coding errors takes hours of investigating the program, so I cannot always help my colleagues,” said one employee who participated in the field study. Sometimes, though, high frequency can also bring high quality of helping: “Employee ‘A’ frequently helps me when I need to compile the software program. The server that can compile the program is far from my desk, so she assists me whenever I need to start compiling, significantly reducing my workload,” said another field study participant. 

The quality of helping was evaluated based on such factors as whether the “solutions this colleague helped me generate would be useful to me” and “the solutions this colleague helped me generate would be effective in alleviating my workload.”  

“To effectively help a colleague who is in need of help, a help giver should pay close attention to quality aspects of helping (for example, identifying the issues faced by the colleague, discovering solutions together, sharing the task if necessary, and checking whether the issue has been resolved after providing help),” the research says.