Help-Seeking and Help-Giving as an Organizational Routine: Continual Engagement in Innovative Work
研究将工作场所中的求助与助人视为一种组织惯例，而非仅基于个体决策的交换行为，揭示了双方通过认知和情感互动推动帮助过程，并受工作情境影响。
The literature on help-giving behavior identifies individual-level factors that affect a help-giver's decision to help another individual. Studying a context in which work was highly interdependent and helping was pervasive, however, we propose that this emphasis on the initial point of consent is incomplete. Instead, we find that workplace help-seeking and help-giving can be intertwined behaviors enacted through an organizational routine. Our research, therefore, shifts the theoretical emphasis from one of exchange and cost to one of joint engagement. More specifically, we move beyond the initial point of consent to recast help-seeking and help-giving as an interdependent process in which both the help-seeker and the help-giver use cognitive and emotional moves to engage others and thereby propel a helping routine forward. In contrast to the existing literature, an organizational routines perspective also reveals that helping need not be limited to dyads, and that the helping routine is shaped by the work context in which help is sought. Finally, we extend these insights to the literatures on routines and coordination and debate how our results might generalize even if helping is not part of an organizational routine.