The double-edged sword of helping behavior in leader-follower dyads

Followership styles scrutinized: temporal consistency and relationships with job attitudes and self-efficacy

While followership has been repeatedly acknowledged as an important part of leadership, key questions are still awaiting empirical testing. In our two studies, we test Kelley's prominent concept of followership styles for the first time in a longitudinal design. Specifically, we use a latent-state trait approach to examine the degree to which followership behaviors (i.e., active engagement [AE] and independent, critical thinking [ICT]) reflect rather stable or rather dynamic behaviors. Furthermore, we examine the relationships of followership behaviors with job attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction and organizational commitment) and self-efficacy in latent states cross-lagged models. We first test our hypotheses in a sample of N = 184 employees from eleven German service organizations, which were surveyed twice with a time lag of nine to 12 months. To replicate and extend our findings from Study 1, we conducted Study 2 with a sample of N = 570 participants from a German open-access panel, which were surveyed twice with a time lag of four months. In Study 2, we additionally test leader humility and perceived organizational support (POS) as potential moderators of the relationships between followership and job attitudes. While our findings support Kelley's conceptualization of followership styles as rather consistent behavior patterns, mixed results were found for the relationships with the other variables. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings as well as the relevance of time in followership research.

When and Why Leaders' Helping Behavior Promotes Employees' Thriving: Exploring the Role of Voice Behavior and Perceived Leader's Role Overload

Employees who thrive contribute to their organization’s competitive advantage and sustainable performance. The aim of this study was to explore how employees’ thriving is shaped by their leaders’ behavior. Drawing on social learning theory, we examined the relationship between perceived leader’s helping behavior and employees’ thriving. Positing voice behavior as a mediator and perceived leader’s role overload as a moderator, we constructed a moderated mediation model. Using 205 daily data points from 51 employees in various industries, we found that perceived leader’s helping behavior had a positive effect on employees’ thriving at work and that employees’ voice behavior mediated this effect. With the increase of perceived leader’s role overload, the positive relationship between perceived leader’s helping behavior and employees’ voice behavior as well as the indirect effect of perceived leader’s helping behavior on employees’ thriving via employees’ voice behavior were increasingly strong. The findings of our study have implications for research on employees’ thriving at work, leaders’ helping behavior, and social learning theory. There are also practical implications for the behavior of leaders who experience role overload.

When does job stress limit organizational citizenship behavior, or not? Personal and contextual resources as buffers

Anchored in conservation of resources theory, this study considers how employees' experience of job stress might reduce their organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), as well as how this negative relationship might be buffered by employees' access to two personal resources (passion for work and adaptive humor) and two contextual resources (peer communication and forgiving climate). Data from a Mexican-based organization reveal that felt job stress diminishes OCB, but the effect is subdued at higher levels of the four studied resources. This study accordingly adds to extant research by elucidating when the actual experience of job stress is more or less likely to steer employees away from OCB – that is, when they have access to specific resources that hitherto have been considered direct enablers of such efforts instead of buffers of employees' negative behavioral responses to job stress.

Dissatisfied employees, diminished helping: Using psychological capital to buffer the damaging effects of job dissatisfaction on helping behaviours

Drawing from conservation of resources theory, this study considers how employees' job dissatisfaction might reduce their engagement in helping behaviour, whereas their psychological capital might enhance this behaviour. The negative relationship between job dissatisfaction and helping behaviour in turn might be buffered by psychological capital. Data from Pakistani organizations provide empirical support for these theoretical predictions. The findings indicate that organizations with employees who feel unhappy about their job situation can still enjoy productive helping behaviours, to the extent they develop adequate personal resources within their ranks.

Threatened but Involved: Key Conditions for Stimulating Employee Helping Behavior

This article examines the relationship between employees’ job involvement and helping behavior directed toward coworkers, as well as how this relationship might be augmented when employees encounter adversity, whether due to malicious leadership (abusive supervision) or threats to their physical integrity (workplace hazards, fear of terrorism). Drawing on a two-wave survey research design that collected data from employees and their supervisors in Pakistan, the results reveal that job involvement increases the likelihood that employees go out of their way to help their coworkers, and this relationship is strongest when they have to deal with the hardships of malicious leadership or threats to their physical safety. For organizations, these findings indicate that employees perceive their own allocation of positive work energy, derived from their job involvement, to helping behaviors that assist other members as particularly useful when they also experience significant adversity, inside or outside the workplace.

Followership: A Classroom Exercise to Introduce the Concept

Followership is valuable for personal and organizational success, whether success is measured by satisfaction with work, improved team relationships, obtaining promotions, or quality and quantity of work output. Furthermore, senior executives and coaches recognize it as a critical skill. Despite this, creating effective followership training in the classroom is challenging because of media messages that preference leadership, internal schemas held by students that ignore followership, and cultural biases against it. This article presents a memorable kinaesthetic, visual classroom activity that introduces followership in a theory-agnostic way. The exercise begins with students introducing each other as leaders or followers, and then debriefing that activity using the Describe, Analyze, and Evaluate methodology from multicultural training. Over a 10-year period, the exercise has successfully engaged undergraduate and graduate students, MBA candidates, and working professionals from frontline to senior management.