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Employee help-seeking: Antecedents, consequences and new insights for future research

July 2009
Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management 28:49-98

DOI: 10.1108/S0742-7301(2009)0000028005

Authors:

Tel Aviv University

Although employee helping behaviors have been widely examined by organizational and human resource management scholars, relatively little is known about the antecedents and consequences of help-seeking in the workplace. Seeking to fill this gap, I draw from the social and counseling psychology literatures, as well as from research in epidemiology and health sociology to first conceptualize the notion of employee help-seeking and then to identify the variables and mechanisms potentially driving such behavior in work organizations. My critical review of this literature suggests that the application of existing models of help-seeking may offer limited predictive utility when applied to the workplace unless help-seeking is conceived as the outcome of a multi-level process. That in mind, I propose a model of employee help-seeking that takes into account the potential direct and cross-level moderating effects of a variety of situational factors (e.g., the nature of the particular problem, organizational norms, support climate) that might have differential influences on help-seeking behavior depending on the particular phase of the help-seeking process examined. Following this, I focus on two sets of help-seeking outcomes, namely, the implications of employee help-seeking on individual and group performance, and the impact of help-seeking on employee well-being. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of some of the more critical issues in employee help-seeking that remain to be explored (e.g., the timing of help solicitation) as well as the methodological challenges likely to be faced by those seeking to engage in such exploration.

An Integrative Model of Work-Based Help-Seeking. PETER BAMBERGER

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EMPLOYEE HELP-SEEKING:

ANTECEDENTS, CONSEQUENCES

AND NEW INSIGHTS FOR FUTURE

RESEARCH

Peter Bamberger

ABSTRACT

Although employee helping behaviors have been widely examined by

organizational and human resource management scholars, relatively little

is known about the antecedents and consequences of help-seeking in the

workplace. Seeking to ﬁll this gap, I draw from the social and counseling

psychology literatures, as well as from research in epidem iology and

health sociology to ﬁrst conceptualize the notion of employee help-seeking

and then to identify the variables and mechanisms potentially driving such

behavior in work organizations. My critical review of this literature

suggests that the application of existing models of help-seeking may offer

limited predictive utility when applied to the workplace unless help-

seeking is conceived as the outcome of a multi-level process. That in mind,

I propose a model of employee help-seeking that takes into account the

potential direct and cross-level moderating effects of a variety of

situational factors (e.g., the nature of the particular problem, organiza-

tional norms, support climate) that might have differential inﬂuences on

help-seeking behavior depending on the particular phase of the help-

seeking process examined. Following this, I focus on two sets of help-

Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, Volume 28, 49–98

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ISSN: 0742-7301/doi:10.1108/S0742-7301(2009)0000028005

seeking outcomes, namely, the implications of employee help-seeking on

individual and group performance, and the impact of help-seeking on

employee well-being. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of

some of the more critical issues in employee help-seeking that remain to

be explored (e.g., the timing of help solicitation) as well as the

methodological challenges likely to be faced by those seeking to engage

in such exploration.

The interest of management and organizational scholars in pro-social

behavior, ‘‘a broad category of acts that are deﬁned by some signiﬁcant

segment of society and/or one’s social group as generally beneﬁcial to other

people’’ (Penner, Dovidio, Piliavin, & Schroeder, 2005, p. 366), has expanded

at an impressive rate since Organ ﬁrst introduced the concept of organiza-

tional citizenship behavior (OCB) in 1977. With its focus on discretionary

helping (Organ, 1988, p. 4; Organ, Podsakoff, & MacKenzie, 2006, p. 34),

much of the OCB literature gives the impression that such behavior is almost

spontaneous, with help-providers seeing an opportunity to provide assistance

and taking steps to do so, and the recipients of help being implicitly regarded

as passive agents (Va

nen, Buunk, Kivima

ki, Pentti, & Vahtera, 2005).

However, several recent treatments of employee helping examining such

behavior through the lens of social exchange (e.g., Bacharach, Bamberger, &

McKinney, 2000; Flynn, 2005) suggest that help-recipients may play a more

active role. For example, Flynn (2005, p. 737) suggests that while some

employees may indeed offer assistance spontaneously, ‘‘without any concern

about immediate or direct reciprocation,’’ others with less collective or

relational identity orientations may be less forthcoming, preferring instead to

wait for help to be solicited so as to allow for the terms of such assistance to

be at least implicitly negotiated. This suggests that at least a certain

proportion of employee helping or individually directed OCB-I is in direct

response to the solicitation of help by a potential help-recipient and that such

active help-seeking is a critical element of any helping-based interaction

(Anderson & Williams, 1996). Indeed, Burke, Weir, and Duncan (1976) found

that approximately 90 percent of the helping interactions reported by the

managers they studied were initiated by someone seeking help. Moreover, as

noted by Nadler (1991, p. 290), helping relationships ‘‘commonly begin when

an individual seeks help.’’

A number of scholars have pointed to the importance of employee help-

seeking in work organizations. For example, Capers and Lipton (1993)

discuss how a ﬁrm’s reputation may be severely damaged when employees fail

PETER BAMBERGER50

to seek help for technical problems that they are unable to resolve on their

own. More speciﬁcally, they relate how, despite their direct access to some of

the leading optics researchers, the Hubble telescope development team failed

to turn to these experts for assistance when encountering technical problems

that they were unable to resolve on their own, with the upshot being the

launching of a space telescope with a seriously ﬂawed mirror. Similarly,

regarding employee help-seeking for more emotional or personal/health

issues, Nadler (1991, p. 290) notes that ‘‘a better understanding of the help-

seeking process should result in the design of more effective helping programs,

which would foster better utilization of available resources and better

personal coping’’; a notion reinforced by the research conducted on employee

assistance and the management of troubled workers (Trice & Roman, 1972;

Bacharach et al., 2000). Indeed, an amicus brief submitted to the United

States Supreme Court in the recent case of Exxon Shipping v. Baker (i.e., the

Exxon Valdez oil spill case) highlighted employer efforts to facilitate help-

seeking on the part of troubled workers as playing a key role in the prevention

of such work-based tragedies (Exxon Shipping v. Baker,2007). Finally,

Morrison reports that among organizational newcomers, the frequency with

which employees sought help to enhance technical job performance and better

understand role expectations was associated with enhanced employee

satisfaction and job performance and with lower turnover intentions.

Surprisingly, however, while well-studied by social and clinical psychol-

ogists, with the exception of a handful of studies (e.g., Lee, 1997, 2002 ), the

concept of help-seeking in the workplace has been largely neglect ed by

organizational scholars. Deﬁning employ ee help-seeking as an interpersonal

process involving the solicitation of the emotional or instrumental assistance

of a work-based colleague (i.e., peer, supervisor or subordinate) to manage

some problem either at or outside of work, my overall aim in this chapter is

to draw scholarly and practitioner attention to what I view as a critical but

under-researched construct. To do so, I will begin by explaining in greater

detail what employee help-seeking is and is not, how it differs from related

constructs such as feedback-seeking and information-seeking, and how it is

related to and distinct from other constructs in its nomological net. In

Section 2, I will then discuss the antecedents of help-seeking, reviewing those

individual and situational factors found by social psychologists and health

researchers to inﬂuence the propensity of adults to seek help. Then, in

Section 3, drawing from the theory of reasoned action (TRA; Ajzen &

Fishbein, 1980) and informational processing theory (IPT; Anderson, 1982),

I will present a model of how these and oth er factors at multiple levels of

analysis may interact to inﬂuence employee help-seeking as a cognitive and

Employee Help-Seeking 51

behavioral process. Following this, in Section 4, I will review the literature

examining the individual and organizational implications of employee help-

seeking, focusing on how help-seeking can inﬂuence both employee job

performance and individual well-being. Finally, I will discuss a number of

areas in which additional research is needed, highlighting some of the

methodological challenges unique to this type of research.

1. WHAT HELP-SEEKING IS AND IS NOT

As described by Nadler (1991), help-seeking is a concept involving three

critical elements, namely, a person in need of help, a source of help, and a

speciﬁc need for help. Lee (1997) builds on these elements, noting that for an

action to qualify as help-seeking there must be (a) a problem or difﬁculty for

which one hope s to ﬁnd relief or some remedy, (b) at least two parties with

one party soliciting the assistance of the other in what is fundamentally an

interpersonal interaction, and (c) proactive action on the part of the help-

seeker to gain the desired relief or remedy.

Much of the literature on help-seeking assumes a subjective expected

utility perspective and describes the construct in terms of the dilemma often

confronted by potential help-seekers (Anderson & Williams, 1996). This

‘‘help-seeker’s dilemma’’ (Nadler, 1991, 1997) reﬂects this tension between

the perceived psychological beneﬁts and costs of helping. Among the

psychological beneﬁts of help-seeking are the potential ability to more

effectively and efﬁciently solve a problem (Ellis & Tyre, 2001; Nadler, 1991),

as well as the ability to (a) learn from or form a relationship with an expert

(Ellis & Tyre, 2001), (b) gain information and expertise (Morrison, 1993 ), (c)

improve task performance (Nadler, Ellis, & Bar, 2003; Weiss & Knight,

1980), and (d) learn new skills and knowledge to resolve problems in the

future (Clark, 1983; Leonard-Barton, 1989). Among the costs typically

considered are (a) the time and energy in identifying the appropriate help-

giver and soliciting his/her assistance (Tyre & Orlikowski, 1994), (b) the

ﬁnancial costs of securing such assistance, and (c), perhaps most

signiﬁcantly, the emotional and social costs having to do with the threat

that help-seeking may pose to one’s sense of self-efﬁcacy and mastery

(Nadler, 1991; Lee, 2002). These emotional and social costs emerge in that

by soliciting assistance, one must implicitly acknowledge inferiority to

potential help-givers (Ames & Lau, 1982), admit incompetence (Karabenick &

Knapp, 1988a, 1988b), and accept dependence on someone else (Druian &

DePaulo, 1977). In that sense, help-seeking may be viewed by some as

PETER BAMBERGER52

having the potential to severely damage the desired positive self-image that

most individuals seek (e.g., Ashford & Northcraft, 1992; Northcraft &

Ashford, 1990; Morrison & Bies, 1991; Lee, 1997, 2002).

Understanding these potential beneﬁts and costs to help-seeking are

critical for two reasons. First, as we discuss in Section 1.1, they play a key

role in distinguishing help-seeking from other types of employee search

behaviors. Second, as we discuss later, they provide the groundwork for

understanding how individual differences, the nature of the problem faced,

and situational conditions may combine to inﬂuence help-seeking decisions.

1.1. How Help-Seeking is Distinct from Related Concepts

In a sense, one might argue that employee help-seeking is no different from

any other types of organizational behavior involving the proactive search

for some needed resource. For example, viewing feedback as a critical

resource that is not always spontaneously available to the employ ee,

organizational researchers (Ashford & Cummings, 1983; Ashford, Lee, &

Bobko, 1989) have explored the con cept of feedback-seeking. Like help-

seeking, feedback-seeking is proactive in nature. Moreover, since the

feedback received may be either positive or negative in nature, such

behavior can also incur signiﬁcant psychological (i.e., ego-related) and social

(impression management-related) beneﬁts and costs. Similarly, viewing

information as a critical resource, Morrison (1993) argues that as in

feedback-seeking, employees also engage in either monitoring or direct

solicitation (i.e., inquiry) to obtain informational cues relevant to their job,

what she refers to as ‘‘information-seeking .’’ Moreover, she asserts that

while both types of behaviors (i.e., feedback- and information-seeking) may,

as noted earlier, generate signi ﬁcant returns to the seeker, the seeker may

also incur signiﬁcant costs. Others (Tyre, 1992) suggest that it may be

difﬁcult to disentangle help-seeking from feedback- and information-seeking

in that all three may occur concurrently.

But these related constructs are different from help-seeking in a number

of very signiﬁcant ways. First, as noted by Lee (1997, p. 338), whereas

employees may engage in information- and feedback-seeking even where no

speciﬁc problem exists, help-seeking by deﬁnition is problem-focused. As

noted earlier, one seeks help speciﬁcally to resolve or cope with a problem,

while one may monitor feedback regularly without regard to any particular

performance issue (Ashford (1986), or may seek out information to prevent

performance- or role-related problems from emerging (Morrison , 1993).

Employee Help-Seeking 53

Second, help-seeking is solidly grounded in notions of social exchange.

Although information- and feedback-seeking may involve discretionary

behavior on the part of the individual from whom the information or

support is solicit ed, to the degree that feedback or information is often

sought precisely from those individuals ﬁlling position s (e.g., mentors,

coaches, boundary spanners) speciﬁcally designed to provide such feedback

and information, their provision cannot necessarily be deemed to be

discretionary on the part of the provider. In contrast, help-giving – rarely

speciﬁed as a formal element of most jobs – typically is discretionary, with

employers often relying on employees’ sense of ‘‘citizenship’’ and good will

to motivate such behavior in all jobs. Moreover, as OCB researchers (Rioux &

Penner, 2001; Spitzmuller, Van Dyne, & Ilies, 2008) note, social exchange

(Blau, 1964) and the principles of reciprocity underlying it (Gouldner, 1960)

are likely to serve as critical motivators of such discretionary behav ior. In

this sense, while feedback and information seekers need not necessarily

consider reciprocity concerns when soliciting such resources from those

whose job descriptions mandate feedback and information provision,

because help-giving is rarely included as an element in most job descriptions,

help-seekers must take such concerns into account. And to the extent that

help-reciprocation demands the expenditures of personal resources, the

decision to seek help is likely to be strongly inﬂuenced by factors shaping

individuals’ subjective calculations of the perceived beneﬁts of seeking help

relative to these perceived costs.

Finally, as also noted by Lee (1997), whereas feedback and informatio n

can be gleaned in the absence of interpersonal interaction (e.g., on-line,

covertly observing others’ behavior, engaging in third party listening;

monitoring ambient cues in one’s environment), helping – by deﬁnition –

requires interpersonal interaction. As noted earlier, in the absence of an

attempt by the help-seeker to initiate an interaction aimed at securing the

assistance of the potential help-provider, one simply cannot speak of help-

seeking. This is meaningful in that as soon as the solicitation of aid involves

an actual interaction, self-presentation concerns become salient, and with

self-presentation concerns come concerns about psychological costs. Thus,

while all forms of seeking behavior (i.e., feedback-, information-, and help-

seeking) involve some degree of percei ved instrumental beneﬁt, what makes

help-seeking unique is that, by deﬁnition, such behavior involves

interpersonal interaction and with it the implicit consideration of the

psychological costs that may accompany any instrumental beneﬁt gleaned

from the provision of the needed aid.

PETER BAMBERGER54

1.2. Types of Help-Seeking

In an attempt to classify different forms of help-seeking, scholars have

tended to rely on one of two different approaches. The ﬁrst, process

approach is grounded on the notion that it may be possible to distinguish on

the basis of the manner in which help is sought, with some help-seekers

soliciting frequent help aimed at allowing them to ‘‘get by,’’ and others

soliciting help less frequently but with the intent of using such assistanc e as a

means by which to enhance their own competencies and boost their

independence. The second, content approach is grounded on the notion that

one can distinguish between types of help-seeking on the basis of the form of

assistance being solicited.

1.2.1. Process Distinctions

For the past 30 years, researchers seeking to identify different forms of help-

seeking have been guided by the adage, ‘‘Give a person a ﬁsh and they’ll eat

for a day, but teach them to ﬁsh and they’ll eat for a lifetime,’’ and the

notion embedded in it that while some help-seekers may seek a quick

solution to their problem, others may seek to learn the competencies needed

to not merely solve any current crisis, but also to avoid or better manage

the issue generating problem in the ﬁrst place. Thus, for example, Asser

(1978) distinguished between negotiating and didactic styles of help-seeking.

Those adopting a negotiating style retain responsibility for the solution

and seek insight that will help them ﬁnd the solution on their own. In

contrast, a didactic style of help is based on the solicitation of assistance

aimed at the immediate resolution of the problem. Similarly, Karabe nick

and Knapp (1988a, 1988b) differentiated between executive help-seeking and

instrumental help-seeking, with the form er focusing on seeking others ’ help

to decrease the cost of task completion and the latter on understanding the

process that will be conducive to more independent problem solving in the

future. Most recent ly, Nadler (1998) distinguished between autonomous and

dependent help-seeking. An individual who engages in help-seeking with the

aim of becoming more independent is viewed as undertaking autonomous

help-seeking, whereas an individual who solicits assistance strictly with the

aim of solving the immediate problem is viewed as engaging in dependent

help-seeking. The autonomous help-seeker is considered an adaptive seeker

that will usually ask for the means (e.g., clarifying methods and hints) with

which to solve the problem by him or herself. In contrast, the dependent

seeker is considered a maladaptive seeker that will usually ask another

Employee Help-Seeking 55

person to provide him/her with a complete solution and pay little attention

to the processes leading to the solution of the problem.

Another framework for categorizing help-seeking has to do with the

degree to which the help-seeker’s intensity or frequency of help solicitation is

consistent with social norms and expectations. Thus, for example, Nadler

(1998) distinguishes between adaptive and mala daptive forms of help-

seeking. Maladaptive help-seeking is deﬁned in terms of a level of help-

seeking intensity or frequency that is either greater or less than what woul d

be deemed socially acceptable or conventional in a given social context.

Seeking help too frequently or intens ively may be deemed as maladaptive in

that it suggests a habitual reliance on the help of others even when one

can do the job and solve the problem alone. Such very high levels of help-

seeking are likely to reﬂect lack of self-conﬁdence rather than effecti ve

utilization of available resources. On the contrary, very low levels of help-

seeking also reﬂect a maladaptive behavioral pattern of habitual reluctance

to approach others for help, even at the cost of not being able to overcome

the difﬁculty.

Integrating these two categorization schemes, Nadler (1998) suggests that

it may be most useful to distinguish between three forms of help-seeking,

namely, autonomous, dependent, and avoidant, with only the autonomous

style – an intermediate level of help-seeking – associated wi th effective

coping and future independence. Indeed, recent research (Nadler et al.,

2003) demonstrates empirical support for the inverted U-shaped curvilinear

relationship suggested between these different forms of help-seeking and

individual performance, with lower levels of performance associa ted with

avoidant (i.e., infrequent) and dependent (frequent and intensive) forms of

help-seeking, and higher levels of performance associated with autonomous

(moderate intensity and frequency) help-seeking. Nevertheless, the distinc-

tion between autonomous and dependent help-seeking remains largely

conceptual, with only one or two studies applying this distinction

empirically (Nadler, 1998; Bamberger & Levi, 2009).

1.2.2. Content Distinctions

Finally, it may also be possible to distinguish between different types of

help-seeking on the basis of the form of help being solicited. Typically,

scholars examining helping and related constructs (e.g., social support) have

distinguished between two or three different forms of help or suppo rt,

namely, instrumen tal and informational (often clustered together as

PETER BAMBERGER56

instrumental) and emotional help (e.g., House, 1981; Barrera, 1986).

Instrumental help-seeking involves the solicitation of assistance that is

more tangible in nature (e.g., provision of money, equipment, or human

capital; Caplan, Cobb, French, Van Harrison, & Pinneau, 1975) and that –

at least in the workplace – is directly related to the fulﬁllment of job

requirements and responsibilities. Informational help refers to the knowl-

edge and advice that individuals may seek from and provide to one another.

Such assistance may be tangible (e.g., provision of an article or book) or

intangible (e.g., referral to a good website or vendor) in nature. To the

degree that informatio nal help in the workplace also tends to be directly

related to the fulﬁllment of job requirements, informational help-seeking is

often considered as a particular form of instrumental help-seeking.

In contrast, emotional help-seeking involves the solicitation of assistance

that is largely non-tangible in nature and that – while perhaps ultimately

having an impact on job performance – is not directly aimed at facilitating

the fulﬁllment of job requirements. Rather, such help is aimed at facilitating

the resolution of problems that are more personal in na ture, often involving

relationship problems or issues relating to an individual’s psychological

well-being, and demanding the sharing of often intimate thoughts and

feelings. As such, relative to instrumental help-seeking, emotional help-

seeking tends to be more expressive and self-revealing in nature (Blau, 1977).

Recent empirical evidence suggests that such emotional help-seeking is

highly relevant to the workplace (Bacharach, Bamberger, & Vashdi 2005).

Indeed, Marks (1994) found that ha lf of all non-kin conﬁding relationships

reported in the General Social Survey were workplace-based.

The boundaries between these two main forms of help-seeking (i.e.,

instrumental and emotional) are not always clear cut. For example,

individuals may ostensibly seek assistance for a very tangible, task-related

workplace problem (inability to solve a task-related problem), while in

reality, using it as a means by which to informally or indirectly solicit advice

for support for a more deep-seated emotional problem (such as the inability

to concentrate on such work-related issues due to problems at home).

Similarly, individuals needing assistance for an emotional problem may

actually be soliciting informational or instrumental help (e.g., advice on or

referral to the best counselor for such matters) rather than emotional help

(e.g., a supportive ear or conﬁdence-boosting talk). Nevertheless, the

distinction between instrumental and emotional help-seeking is useful in

that, as will be discussed later, the processes leading to (and consequences

stemming from) each of them have been found to differ somewhat.

Employee Help-Seeking 57

2. ANTECEDENTS OF HELP-SEEKING

Understanding what help-seeking is and how it is distinct from related

constructs, we next turn to the individual difference and situational factors

that may explain the variance in individuals’ help-seeking decisions. More

speciﬁcally, we will attempt to answer a number of very basic questions

regarding employee help-seeking such as why are some workers quick to

request assistance while others prefer to sink deeper and deeper before even

considering the possibility of perhaps asking for help? and why might

individuals be more likely to ask for assistance with a computer-related

problem than with marriage-related problem? In answering these and other

similar questions, I will draw from two primary literatures on helping and

help-seeking, namely, the social psychology literature (which focuses on

examining pe rson and situational determinants of whether help is sought)

and the epidemiological literature (which focuses on linking individual

differences to services utilization).

As will be apparent from the discussion, in both of these literatures, the

antecedents of help-seeking have been framed around the help-seekers’

dilemma noted earlier. As such, researchers have tended to focus on those

individual and situational variables factors viewed as likely to either

enhance the perceived beneﬁts of helping or lower the perceived costs of

helping. In general, variables that increase the perceived instrumental value

of help tend to be associated with an increased probability or frequency of

help-seeking behavior, whereas variables that increase the psychological

costs tend to be associated with a lower probability or frequency of help-

seeking (Nadler et al., 2003; Anders on & Williams, 1996).

For human resource (HR) scholars, this body of research certainly has its

limitations, not the least of which is that few of the studies in this domain

involve work or employees as the empirical referent. Nevertheless, I believe

that the ﬁndings are largely generalizable to the workplace, and in my

discussion, I will attempt to highlight the work-related implications of

those studies reviewed. Additionally, although the vast majority of the

research on the antecedents of help-seeking has been aimed at identifying

those variables that inﬂuence whether an individual engages in help-seeking

in the ﬁrst place or the frequency with which they do so, as summarized in

Table 1, a handful of studies have sought to examine how these antecedents

may vary depending on the type of he lp sought. I will detail these ﬁndings

and link them back to the earlier discussion on help-seeking types where

relevant.

PETER BAMBERGER58

2.1. Individual Factors

Early ﬁndings on the individual difference variables factors inﬂuencing help-

seeking for physical and mental health problems indicate that gender,

education, race, and socio-economic status are all potentially important

predictors (DePaulo, 1982). More recently, additional individual difference

variables such as self-esteem, attachment style, achievement motivation,

shyness, self-monitoring, age, self-efﬁcacy, and power motivation have also

been suggested as possible help-seeking an tecedents. In the following

sections, I review some of the ﬁndings of social psychologists regardi ng a

number of these possible help-seeking antecedents.

2.1.1. Gender

There is a gene ral consensus in the literature that women seek more help

than men regardless of the kind of help requested (e.g., medical help,

Verbugge, 1981; psych iatric help, Fischer, Winer, & Abramowitz, 1983;

radio counseling programs, Raviv, Raviv, & Yunovitz, 1989 ; and college

counseling centers, Robertson, 1988). Sex roles and gender socialization

provide the primary explanation for this phenomenon, with help-seeking in

Table 1. The Impact of Various Individual, Dyadic, and Situational

Characteristics on Help-Seeking by Type of Help Sought.

Antecedent

Factor

Amount of Help Sought by Help-Seeking Type

Autonomous Dependent Instrumental Emotional Reference

Gender – – No difference WomenWmen Robertson (1988)

Attachment

type

Secures seek

more than

others

Anxious-

avoidants

seek more

than others

––Nadler (1998)

Problem

severity

– – Inverse U-shaped

relationship

Positive

monotonic

relationship

Scott & Roberto

(1985);

Karabenick &

Knapp (1988a,

1988b)

Social

proximity

– – Negative impact Positive impact Nadler (1987);

Bacharach,

Bamberger, &

Sonnenstuhl

(2001)

Employee Help-Seeking 59

most cultures deemed as a more legitimate element of the feminine sex role

than of the masculine sex ro le (Gross & McMullen, 1982). More speciﬁcally,

the traditional feminine sex role encourages other orientation and the

building or relationships (even at the cost of acknowledging dependency on

others), whereas masculinity emphasizes the display of strength, control,

achievement, and independence (Gilligan, 1982; Powell, 1990; Lee, 1997).

Consequently, enactment of the male sex role may result in a tendency

among men to avoid labeling needs and inadequacies as problems, thus

reducing the perceived need for the assistance of others (Wills & DePaulo,

1991). A second explanation for the tendency of women to seek help more

than men is that even when men deﬁne problems as such, relative to women,

they may place greater consideration on the negative impression that help-

seeking will have on others (Bruder-Mattson & Hovanitz, 1990). As a result,

for men, any instrumental gain from help-seeking is likely to be more

heavily counter-weighted by the psychological costs, making the help-

seeking alternative relatively less attractive.

Still, such gender differences in help-seeking do not necessarily manifest

themselves in the workplace. For example, while Lee (1997) found female

nurses to report higher self-reported help-seeking than male nurses,

differences in help-seeking between male and female physicians were not

signiﬁcant. Lee (1997, p. 356) speculates that the lack of a signiﬁcant gender

effect among physicians stems from the likelihood that when females were

put in the ‘‘masculine’’ role of physician, they ‘‘intentionally suppressed’’

behaviors indicative of dependence or inferiority such as help-seeking. The

research of Wills and DePaulo (1991) suggests an alternative explanation,

namely, that such gender differences may only apply for mild states of need.

Their ﬁndings suggest that when individuals face serious problems (i.e.,

matters likel y to be deﬁned by all as a ‘‘problem’’), men may in fact seek

more help than women. Similarly, gender differences in help-seeking appear

to narrow when individuals require assistance for problems of a more

instrumental nature (Robertson, 1988), perhaps because such problems may

be deemed by men to be less stigmatizing than emotional problems.

2.1.2. Age

Age appears to have an inverse association with help-seeking (Brown, 1978;

Veroff, 1981). More speciﬁcally, as adults age, they tend to seek help less

frequently, most likely due to the importance these individuals place on

personal independence (Lieberman & Tobin, 1983). As noted by Nadler

(1991, p. 294), it may be that as the issue of independence becomes more ego-

central with declining health in older age, ‘‘the psychological costs associated

PETER BAMBERGER60

with losing it, even temporarily, by seeking help are high, and help seeking is

not favored.’’ Given that older workers comprise an ever-increasing portion

of the workforce in many Western nations (Hedge, Borman, & Lammlein,

2006), these ﬁndings have potentially critical implications for HR scholars

and practitioners. More speciﬁcally, they suggest that as an organization’s

workforce ages, managers may need to adopt a more proactive approach to

employee help-seeking by, among other things, reinforcing workplace norms

facilitating and encouraging help-seeking.

2.1.3. Socio-Economic Status

Individuals with higher socio-economic status – typically operationalized in

terms of education and income – are more likely to seek psychological help

and do so more frequently than those associated with lower socio-economic

strata (Fischer et al., 1983; Nadler, 1998). However, such ﬁndings may reﬂect

the economic feasibility of service utilization more than anything else,

particularly in research in which actual visits to mental health professionals

serves as the dependent variable. For example, the inverse association

between socio-economic status and help-seeking may be spurious to the

extent that the lower socio-economic strata are dominated by members of

ethnic groups tending to rely on informal, family-based support (as opposed

to professional service providers) as a means by which to manage emotional

problems and needs. Indeed, there is no evidence linking socio-economic

status to the prevalence or frequency of instrumental forms of help-seeking.

Research has also tied socio-economic status to the way in which assistance

is solicited. More speciﬁcally, Asser (1978) found that higher socio-economic

status individuals tended to apply a negotiating style when seeking help,

while those with a lower socio-economic status employed a more didactic

style when seeking help. Thus, while the former sought help more frequently

than the latter, because those with a higher socio-economic status took on

more responsibility for problem resolution, the amount of help they required

on each help-seeking occasion was signiﬁcantly less.

2.1.4. Self-Esteem

The effect of self-esteem on help-seeking behavior is controversial. Most

researchers argue that individuals high in self-esteem seek less help than

individuals that are low in self-esteem (e.g., Miller, 1985; Nadler & Fisher,

1986; Weiss & Knight, 1980). Following these ﬁndings, Nadler (1998) claims

that individuals that are high in self-esteem face the danger of underuti lizing

help, whereas those with low self-es teem face the danger of overutilizing it.

Indeed, Fischer et al. (1983) found that low-self-esteem individuals seek

Employee Help-Seeking 61

psychiatric treat ment more than high-self-esteem individuals. Miller (1985)

found the same phenomenon among alcoholics and abused women. This

connection between self-esteem and help-seeking has been summarized in

the notion, ‘‘the utility of humility’’ (Weiss & Knight, 1980), expressing the

idea that people high in self-esteem may tend to underutilize help whereas

people low in self-esteem show greater willingness to seek help. Weiss and

Knight (1980) illustrate their deﬁnition by describing situations in which

low-self-esteem individuals arrive at better solutions than high-self-esteem

individuals because they show more willingness to get other people’s

guidance and advice.

However, other researchers have found a positive link between self-esteem

and help-seeking (i.e., high-self-esteem individuals seek more help than low-

self-esteem individuals). For example, Aspinwall and Taylor (1992) reported

that high-self-esteem individuals actively seek social support to mitigate

stress. Similarly, Nadler, Mayseless, Peri, and Chemerinski (1985) found

that high-self-esteem individuals asked for help more frequently (Nadler

et al., 1985) when they were able to reciprocate such assistanc e. This ﬁnding

suggests that the perceived ability to reciprocate may condition the impact

of self-efﬁcacy on help-seeking. As long as reciprocation is possible, those

with greater self-esteem may view help-seeking as posing no long-term risk

to their self-image and may thus discount the psycho logical costs associated

with such behavior (Nadler, 1986, 1991; Nahum-Shani & Bamberger, 2008).

2.1.5. Attachment Styles

Bowlby’s (1973) attachment theory serves as an additional source for

exploring individual difference variables that have bearing on help-seeking.

In this case, attachment styles serve as the independent variables. While

recent research by Geller and Bamberger (in press) suggests that attachment

style is predictive of instrumental (but not emotional) coworker helping,

Nadler (1998) uses Hazan and Shaver’s (1987) distinction between three

attachment styles (i.e., secure, avoidant, and anxious–ambiv alent) to predict

what kind of help-seeking behavior will be observed. Secure individuals (i.e.,

people who believe others will be there for them when they need them) were

predicted to engage primarily in autonomous help-seeking. Moreover,

according to Nadler, avoidant individuals (i.e., individuals with a tendency

to be fearful or dismissing of intimacy and who cope by denying and

inhibiting emotions) can be expected to underutilize he lp-seeking while

anxious–ambivalent (i.e., individuals who are preoccupied by their relation-

ships with others) can be expected engage in dependent help-seeking.

PETER BAMBERGER62

2.1.6. Shyness

One of the main features of shyness is a refusal to seek help or advice

(Zimbardo, 1977), thus making it be almost by deﬁnition that shyness is

inversely associated with help-seeking (Nadler, 1991). Consequently, it is not

surprising that shy students have been found to solicit less help from their

academic advisor than non-shy students (Wills & DePaulo, 1991). However,

this inverse link between shyness and help-seeking may be conditioned by a

number of factors. One of these may be the degree to which the type of help

needed demands direct, face-to-face (as opposed to less personal, e.g.,

computer-mediated) help solicitation, with Nadler (1991) suggesting that the

inverse impact of shyness on help-seeking may be attenuated when

assistance is sought less personally or directly.

2.1.7. Achievement Motivation

Achievement motivation inﬂuences help-seeking behavior in two contra-

dictory ways. On one hand, high achievers appear to be more willing to

succeed than low achievers, and as such, they may demonstrate more help-

seeking (Nadler, 1998 ). In addition, due to the importance high achievers

attribute to task completion, one can expect more help-seeking from them

(Nadler, 1991). On the other hand, high achievers value individual

achievement and therefore prefer to cope by themselves and avoid seeking

help (Nadler, 1991). In her work on power motivation described earlier,

Lee (1997) reaches a similar conclusion, ﬁnding that when organizational

members perceive gaining and maintaining power as extremely impor-

tant, they are reluctant to seek help. These contradictory ﬁndings may be

resolved when taking the self-per ceptions of ability and control into

account. As long as the matter for which the individual seeks help does not

directly reﬂect on the individual’s overall ability and sense of control, high

achievers are likely to view the net beneﬁts of help-seeking as outweighing

any social costs.

2.2. Situational Factors

Situational factors are also likely to play a role in shaping individuals’ help-

seeking decisions (Lee, 1997). Although a large number of situational

antecedents of help-seeking have been considered by social psychologists,

most of these can be clustered into three categories. The ﬁrst concerns

the nature of the problem for which help-seeking may be considered.

The second concerns the characteristics of those from whom help may

Employee Help-Seeking 63

be sought. The third has to do with the context within which the help is

being sought.

In describing these three sets of situational factors, I will attempt to

highlight the mechanism by which each is thought to inﬂuence help-seeking.

In general, two main mechanisms may be considered. First, by shaping

individual perceptions of the relative costs and ben eﬁts of help-seeking

mechanism, situational factors may have a direct, additive effect on the

subjective expected utility of such behavior. Second, consistent with trait

activation theory (Tett & Guterman, 2000), certain situational character-

istics may serve as a cue for the expression of some of trait-relevant

tendencies. That is, some of the individual difference effects on help-seeking

discussed in Section 2.1 may be contingent on the presence of certain

situational factors, suggest ing an interaction between individual differences

and situational antecedents of help-seeking. For example, Lee’s (1997)

ﬁnding that gender effects on help-seeking are contingent on the normative

context suggest that power motivation and concerns (stronger for some

individuals than for others) in help-seeking may be triggered by particular

contextual conditions.

2.2.1. Characteristics of the Problem for Which Help is Needed

Research has focused on three main problem characteristics that, by shaping

individual perceptions of the instrumental and emotional costs and beneﬁts

of help-seeking, may ultimately play a role in determining whether or how

frequently individuals seek help, as well as the type of help they seek.

First, while researchers suggest that perceived problem severity or the level

of help needed may be associated with help-s eeking, there is a general lack of

consensus regarding the nature of this association. On the one hand,

research on help-seeking for mental health problems (i.e., emotional help-

seeking) indicates that the relationship is positive and linear with help-

seeking increasing monotonically as a function of problem severity or level

of need (Fischer et al., 1983; Scott & Roberto, 1985 ). On the other hand,

others (Amato & Saunders, 1985; Karabenick & Knapp, 1988a, 1988b) have

found a cu rvilinear relationship between the amounts of help needed and

help-seeking with high-ne ed individuals seeking little more help than low-

need individuals, and moderate-need individuals seeking the most help.

The discrepancy in these ﬁndings may stem from the empirical referent

used in each of these cases with the positive, linear relationship found in

studies of emotional help-seeking (e.g., help solicited for mental health

problems) and the curvilinear relationship found in studies of instrument al

help-seeking (e.g., help solicited for task-related problems in an educational

PETER BAMBERGER64

context). While increasing levels of emotional/psychological need may make

normal functioning without help very difﬁcult, increasing levels of

educational needs (e.g., failure to understand a theory or algorithm) do

not normally interfere with normal, every-day functioning. Moreover, in the

case of the latter, as suggested by Amato and Saunders, more severe

problems may cue indivi duals to perceive a sense of limit ed ability and low

self-esteem. As noted earlier, in such situations, help-seeking – viewed as

only further threatening the individual’s sense of self-worth – may amplify

the psychological costs of help-seeking and thus reduce the subjective

expected utility of any help received. As a result, instrumental assistance for

more severe problems may be less frequently solicited than instrumental

assistance for problems of mod erate severity.

A second problem-related characteristic likely to shape help-seeking has

to do with the degree to which the problem is perceived as being ego-central,

stigmatized, or embarrassing. Ego-central problems are those need states

that the individual perceives as reﬂecting some personal inadequacy for

which he/she is responsible and that cannot be attributed to some factor

beyond his/her control. Help-seeking for such problems requires the

recognition of such inadequacies and what may be perceived as the

admission of such inadequacies before some other person. Posing a direct

threat to the individual’s self-image or self-esteem, such problems may cue

esteem-based tendencies to avoid help-seeking or simply increase the

perceived psychological costs associated with the solicitation of assistance

(Lee, 2002). Regardless, to the degree to which problems are perceived as

such, they are likely to de-motivate help-seeking (Nadler & Fisher, 1986).

Indeed, Wills (1992) ﬁnds that most people who suffer from serious

psychological problems are reluctant to seek emotiona l help, even when this

help is provided without any cost. Similarly, Amato and Saunders (1985)

demonstrated that individuals may also be reluctant to seek help for

problems deemed to be embarrassing or stigmatizing. This body of research

would suggest , therefore, that a worker would be far more likely to seek

instrumental help (e.g., help for a computer glitch that he/she is unable to

resolve on his/her own) than for emotional help (e.g., help for a chronic

tardiness stemming from an underlying gambling addiction).

Finally, the degree to which the problem is perceived as being shared by

others or what Nadler (1991) refers to as problem consensus level is also

likely to shape the likelihood of help-seeking. Building on attribution theory

(Heider, 1958), researchers (Nadle r & Porat, 1978; Tessler & Schwartz,

1972) suggest that when need states are viewed as widely shared, individuals

will attribute their problems to external sources and view the need for

Employee Help-Seeking 65

assistance as something that is less self-threatening. In con trast, less widely

shared problems are more difﬁcult to externally attribute, thus increasing

the likelihood that the problem will be deemed more ego-central and

consequently increasing the self-threatening nature of help-seeking and

reducing the likelihood of help-seeking. It is important to note, however,

that widespread sharing of a problem may also reduce the likelihood of

help-seeking if, as a result of the widespread prevalence of such behavior,

individuals are unaware that their behavior is ‘‘problematic.’’ For example,

as discussed by Sonnenstuhl (1996), employees with substance abuse

problems may be signiﬁcantly less likely to seek help for their problem to

the extent that their drinking behavior is deemed ‘‘normal’’ by their peers.

To the extent that permissive organizational or occupatio nal drinking

norms may be interpreted by these individuals as evidence that their volume

or pattern of consumption is within the boundaries of ‘‘normal’’ (and hence

that they have no drinking problem), there is a diminished probability that

they will seek help (Sonnenstuhl, 1996; Bacharach et al., 2001).

2.2.2. Characteristics of Help-Provider

A second set of situational factors found to inﬂuence help-seeking behaviors

has to do with the characteristics of the help-provider. One such provider

characteristic has to do wi th his/her social proximity to, or status differences

relative to, the help-seeker. Theory suggests that individuals prefer to seek

assistance from socially proximate others (e.g., coworkers) to reduce the risk

of refusal (Blau, 1955) and avoid the risk of appearing incompetent in the

eyes of those able and often required to take administrative action if

incompetence is identiﬁed (Lee, 1997 ). However, the empirical research on

the impact of social proximity and status on help-seeking is mixed, with

experimental studies (typically of students presented with the opportunity to

seek help from a similar others; Nadler, Fisher, & Ben Itzhak, 1983; Nadler

& Fisher, 1986; Nadler, 1987) suggesting an inverse effect (i.e., proximity

reduces the likelihood of help solicitation) and ﬁeld/epidemiological

research (focusing on intimate others; Wills, 1983; Wills & DePaulo, 1991;

Newman & Goldin, 1990; Morrison, 1993) suggesting the obverse.

One explanation for this empirical inconsistency may be the differential

operationalization of social proximity. Similar others are not necessarily

those that the individual feels close enough with to display personal

weaknesses or inadequacies. Indeed, on the basis of social comparison

theory (Festinger, 1954), the implicit admission of a personal inadequacy to

similar others as part of help-seeking may be more ego-threat ening than the

need to do so with individuals who are less socially proximate and therefore

PETER BAMBERGER66

less likely to indu ce a negative comparison (e.g., supervisors, professionals).

In contrast, intimate others tend not to serve as the basis for social

comparison and instead may be deﬁned as those with whom the individual

feels enough trust to openly expose personal limitations and inadequacies.

Indeed, the diminished psychological costs of seeking help from an

intimate other appear to underlie the tendency of individuals to precede any

formal help-seeking (e.g., soliciting the assistant of a consultant, clinician, or

psychologist) by ﬁrst engaging in more informal help-seeking with those with

whom he/she is more socially proximate. The purpose of such initial,

informal help-seeking is to acknowledge the problem and generate possible

solutions or referral sources. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the

problem, the socially proximate help-provider may facilitate formal help-

seeking by taking on some of the responsibility of seeking more professional

help, thus reducing the perceived costs of doing so to the individual in need.

Indeed, this notion of social proximity in help-seeking underlies an important

stream of research in the management of troubled workers, namely, that

research focusing on peer assistance in the workplace (Sonnenstuhl, 1996;

Bacharach, Bamberger, & Sonnenstuhl, 1996; Bacharach et al., 2001).

A second help-provider characteristic inﬂuencing help-seeking appears to

be the helper’s physical attractiveness. Here too, the results are mixed, with

some results indicating that attractiveness may cue esteem-saving concerns

and thus deter help-seeking (Zanna & Pack, 1975; Stokes & Bickman, 1974),

others suggesting that attractiveness may cue ingratiation concerns and thus

motivating help-seeking (Nadler, Shapira, & Ben-Itzhak, 1982), and still

others indicating that the effects of attractiveness on help-seeking are

contingent on there existing a possibility for future interaction (i.e., least help

solicited from an attractive provider when a future meeting is expected;

Nadler, 1980) and on the social norms regarding the acceptability or

favorability of presenting oneself as dependent (i.e., more help solicited from

an attractive other when social norms emphasize the acceptability of

dependency; Nadler et al., 1982).

2.2.3. Context

The third set of sit uational factors found to inﬂuence help-seeking behaviors

has to do with the context within which help-seeking occurs. Of prim ary

concern is the visibility of such behavior to others with a number of studies

suggesting that the likelihood of help-seeking is greater when such behavior

is less exposed to others (Nadle r & Porat, 1978; Ashford & Northcraft,

1992). Underlying such an effect is most likely the heightened threat to self-

esteem or self-image generated when, by virtue of seeking help, individuals

Employee Help-Seeking 67

are required to publicly expose their inadequacy or dependency. However,

particularly in the workplace, employees may be concerned that any

exposure of their personal problems or inadequacies may generate formal or

informal responses contrary to their best interests. For example, individuals

may be hesitant to discuss a certain personal problem with coworkers for

fear that, should these matters come to the attention of management, they

could have signiﬁcant, adverse career implications.

Such concerns on the part of those in need may explain the relatively high

utilization of anonymous helping services such as hot-line counseling (Hill &

Harmon, 1976). However, research by Raviv et al. (1989) suggests that these

advantages of anonymity may be attenuated when the problem or need is

deemed more serious. In such cases, the perceived beneﬁts of soliciting help

may simply outweigh the perceived costs of possible exposure. Still,

recognition of the impact of visibility underlies the emphasis on conﬁdenti-

ality in most work-based helping programs such as employee assistance

programs. Interestingly, while these programs in nearly all cases promise

employees that their services will be provided in conﬁdence, research suggests

that employees may still have their doubts, thus potentially deterring

employee help-seeking and service utilization (Bacharach, Bamberger, &

Sonnenstuhl, 1994).

2.2.4. Workplace-Speciﬁc Contextual Factors

Other contextual fact ors speciﬁc to the workplace may also play a direct role

in shaping individual beliefs and expectations associated with help-seeking.

For example, Bacharach et al. (2005) found that unit support climates played

an important role in determining the degree to which employees turned

to one another for assistance on emotional matters. Similarly, studies on a

variety of organizational climate-related factors (e.g., Bennett & Lehman,

2001) suggest that common perceptions among unit members regarding the

degree to which unit members (a) are provided with autonomy and decision

inﬂuence and authority on the job (i.e., employee control climate), (b) can

be trusted not to leak private information (privacy regulation climate), and

workplace (i.e., privacy regulation climate) may also shape the beliefs and

outcome expectations (particularly those having to do with self-efﬁcacy and

hence positive and negative disclosure expectancies) from which help-

seeking attitudes are derived. To the degree that such climates promote

more positive help-seeking beliefs and attitudes, help-seeking in such units is

likely to be greater than in units in which such climates are weaker or

altogether absent.

PETER BAMBERGER68

Furthermore, studies examining the impact of organizational or work

unit norms (e.g., attendance norms) on the behavior of members of work

units (e.g., absenteeism) suggest that the more that particular behaviors are

commonly deemed by referent others in one’s workplace as being more

legitimate and acceptable, the more likely they are to be enacted by

individual members of such work units (Bamberger & Biron, 2007). Such

studies would suggest that beliefs about the legitimacy of certain types of

behavior may be inﬂuenced by contextual, stigma-related norms, with these

norms therefore inﬂuencing perceived need states and hence the subjective

expected utility of help-seeking. For exampl e, chronically absent employees

may be less likely to seek help for their absence problem in work units in

which such behavior is deemed ‘‘normal’’ and ‘‘legitimate’’ than in units in

which attendance is the norm and absenteeism is labeled as problematic.

Norms of collectivism (emphasizing interdependence) or individualism

(emphasizing the importance of independence) may also inﬂuence help-

seeking (Lee, 1997). For example, in units characterized by strong

individualistic norms, workers may be more reluctant to request the

assistance of others since that would be an open acknowledgment of

dependence, directly cou nter to what is commonly viewed as appropriate

and legitimate. In contrast, in units with more collectivistic norms,

employees may feel that help-seeking is in fact encouraged as a means by

which to spread (and hence even equalize) knowledge and reinforce mutual

interdependencies. Interestingly, in her experimental study of helping-

seeking, Lee (1997) found that while females’ help-seeking remained

relatively constant regardless of normative condition, males’ help-seeking

was signiﬁcantly conditioned by normative con dition (i.e., higher under

collective conditions, lower under individualistic conditions).

Finally, drawing from non-work-based studies, we can infer that a variety

of workplace social network charact eristics may play a role in determining

attitudes regarding help-seeking. For example, to the degree that longer

enduring social networks are likely to enhance reciprocity beliefs and hence

lower disclosure expectancies (Wills & DePaulo, 1991), average unit-

member tenure may be associated with increased prevalence of help-seeking.

3. AN INTEGRATIVE MODEL OF

WORK-BASED HELP-SEEKING

Despite the advances in the research on help-seeking noted earlier,

signiﬁcant gaps in our understanding of help-seeking processes, particularly

Employee Help-Seeking 69

as they unfold in the workplace, remain. First, most work-based help-

seeking studies have focused on demographic differences in rates of

employee assistance services utilization (e.g., Bamberger & Sonnenstuhl,

1996; Bennett & Lehman, 2001), with only a handful of studies seeking to

identify workplace-speciﬁc, situational determinants of help-seeking (e.g.,

Lee, 1997; Nadler et al., 2003; Geller, Ellis, & Nadler, 2008). Second, given

the difﬁculties in conducting prospective research on actual help-seeking,

few studies have been designed to examine the interplay over time of

individual and contextual factors serving as possible triggers and barriers to

help-seeking. Instead, much of the resear ch on help-seeking has focused on

either retrospective accounts provided by those who received assistance or

cross-sectional studies of individuals’ (often students’) help-seeking attitudes

or intentions to seek help. Consequently, the work-based help-seeking

literature lacks any theory-driven model aimed at depicting how each of

these different factors – some at the individual level and some at the unit or

organizational level – may combine to shape help-seeking decisions.

In attempt to begin to ﬁll this gap, I propose a model that integrates many

of the factors noted earlier into a single model of work-based help-seeking;

one based on two theoretical perspectives, namely, the TRA (Ajzen &

Fishbein, 1980) and IPT (Anderson, 1982). The TRA is appropriate for

understanding help-seeking processes in that it is a general, utility-based

framework for understanding the process by which particular behaviors, as

well as shifts in behavioral patterns, emerge. Indeed, as noted by Vogel,

Wester, Wei, and Boysen (2005, p. 460), ‘‘several researchers have suggested

that a better understanding of people’s help-seeking behavior could be

gathered by using the TRA.’’ An informational processing approach may be

useful in that, as noted by Vogel, Wester, Heesacker, Boysen, and Seeman

(2006), while such an approach views behavior as emerging as the result of

an active decision-making process on the part of the individual, it also

assumes that this process is strongly inﬂuenced by how people interpret and

respond to their environment. Consequently, as a theoretical perspective, it

demands the incorporation of context and situational inﬂuences into the

explanatory model as individuals encode and interpret internal and external

cues, generate and evaluate the beneﬁts and costs of alternative behavioral

options, and decide on and enact a selected response (Vogel et al., 2006,

p. 399). On the basis of these two perspectives, I propose a step-based,

process model in which personal and social factors shape expecta ncy beliefs

that, in turn, inﬂuence attitudes toward seeking help, with the latter deemed

to play a signiﬁcant role in determining the likelihood that an individual will

actively seek help.

PETER BAMBERGER70

This model (portrayed in Fig. 1) incorporates two sub-processes . The ﬁrst

sub-process models the (a) direct and indirect impact of personal and

contextual fact ors on individuals’ attitudes toward seeking help and

(b) problem recognition and need awareness. The second sub-process describes

how these help-seeking attitudes interact with need awareness and problem

recognition to inﬂuence actual help-seeking, and how this interaction may

itself vary across work units depending on particular unit characteristics

(i.e., a three-way, cross-level interaction).

3.1. Shaping of Attitudes toward Help-Seeking and Need Awareness

Vogel et al. (2005, 2006) and Vogel and Wei (2005) have demonstrated that

the link between a variety of personal help-seeking beliefs and expectations

and the intent to seek help is fully mediated by attitudes toward seeking help

in general. Indeed, Vogel et al. (2005, p. 460) argue that because many of the

psychological factors examined in earlier research as possible antecedents of

help-seeking (and reviewed earlier) ‘‘may be considered either to be perceived

as those that lead to a positive outcome (e.g., reduce feelings of distress) and

thus increase positive attitudes, or to be perceived as leading to a negative

outcome (e.g., increased social stigma, fear of having to disclose painful

feelings) and thus increase negative attitudes,’’ these psychological factors

may be most appropriately and parsimoniously be modeled as outcome

expectations effecting persons’ help-seeking intentions and behaviors through

their effect on attitudes. This linkage is indicated by path 1 in Fig. 1.

Using student samples, Vogel et al. (2005, 2006) found support for

ﬁve belief factors as predictors of attitudes toward seeking help, namely,

(1) public stigma-related beliefs (i.e., perceptions that by seeking help the

individual will be viewed by a particular group as undesirable or socially

unacceptable), (2) private stigma-related beliefs (i.e., the belief that by

seeking help for a particular problem one is inferior or less adequate or at

least admitting failure), (3) positive and (4) negative outcome expectancies

(i.e., utility, risk) associated with the self-disclosure of distressing emotions,

and (5) beliefs about the norms held by intimate others regarding the

acceptability of seeking help for a given problem (i.e., normative beliefs). As

might be expected, however, the inﬂuence of public stigma beliefs and

negative outcome expectancies as predictors of help-seeking attitudes was

contingent on the type of problem for which help might be sought, with

effects ampliﬁed in the case of more emotional/psychological problems such

Employee Help-Seeking 71

Help-seeking

Need

Awareness

and Problem

Recognition

Attitudes

Toward Help -

seeking

Help-related

Expectations & Beliefs

(e.g., Positive &

Negative Disclosure

Expectations)

Work Unit

Characteristics (e.g.,

permissive norms;

normative, privacy

regulation and peer

intervention climates,

mean unit member

tenure; peer/supervisor

support climates; unit-

level awareness

of/confidence in

services)

Problem Type and Need

Severity

Individual

differences

and personal

factors

Fig. 1. An Integrative Model of Work-Based Help-Seeking.

PETER BAMBERGER72

as an alcohol problem . This moderating effect of problem type is reﬂected

by path 2 in Fig. 1.

While there is little doubt that such beliefs and expectancies are shaped by

multiple individual factors such as those reviewed earlier (path 3 in Fig. 1),

they may also be inﬂuenced by workplace characteristics and thus mediate

the link between workplace characteristics and attitudes tow ard help-

seeking (path 4 in Fig. 1). Organizational and unit norms regarding

particular work behaviors and misbehaviors may serve as one such set of

workplace characteristics potentially shaping outcome be liefs and expec-

tancies. Thus, for example, nor ms encouraging independence and indepen-

dent coping have been highlighted as generating rather negative outcome

expectancies and consequently negative help-seeking attitudes among school

teachers (Chubbuck, Clift, Allard, & Quinlan, 2001). Similarly, as suggested

by Sonnenstuhl (1996), for employees with drinking problems, permissive

unit norms regarding alcohol consumption are likely to enhance individuals’

public and private stigma-related beliefs about help-seeking for such

behavior (i.e., strengthen beliefs that help-seeking for drinking behavior is

not deemed legitimate by intimate others). To the degree that heavier

patterns of drinking are deemed legitimate and ‘‘normal’’ in the work unit,

members of work units characterized by more permissive drinking norms

may take it for granted that their peers would question the appropriateness

of turning for professional help for dealing with one’s drinking behavior, or

worse, might even view it as a sign that one is not ‘‘s trong enough’’ to hold

their liquor. Consequently, members of work units characterized by more

permissive work units may attach greater public and private stigma to help-

seeking than members of units with less permissive drinking norms and may

therefore have less positive attitudes about seeking help.

A second set of contextual factors likely to inﬂuence stigma, perceived

social norms and outcome expectancy beliefs (and hence help-seeking

attitudes), are those having to do with the unit support climate (Bacharach &

Bamberger, 2007), namely, the degree to which (a) unit members’ norms

promote and are supportive of help-seeking (i.e., normative climate), (b) unit

members trust one another with not leaking private information (privacy

regulation climate), (c) unit members feel willing and able to intervene to

help coworkers with personal problems and encourage one another to seek

help (as opposed to encouraging them to simply ‘‘sweep them under the

rug’’) when doing so (peer intervent ion climate). Two separate streams of

research suggest that such unit support climate factors are likely to result in

members maintaining more positive disclosure expectations and fewer

stigma-related beliefs (Rickwood & Braithwaite, 1994).

Employee Help-Seeking 73

First, in units in which such behavior is widely supported and encouraged

by peers employees, help-seekers’ expectancies about the willingness of

providers to accede to help requests may be more consistent with actual

provider willingness. Recent research by Flynn and Lake (2008) indicates that

help-seekers may underestimate by as much as 50 percent the likelihood that

others will agree to a direct request for help, implicitly increasing the

perceived social costs of soliciting assistance. They demonstrate that this

discrepancy stems largely from the tendency of help-seekers to underestimate

the social costs to help-providers of declining such a request (i.e, saying ‘‘no’’).

To the extent that units characterized by stronger support climates may better

align seeker perceptions of such costs with those of help-providers, potential

help-seekers may be less concerned about the costs of request denial, and thus

be more willing to self-disclose problems or competency limitations.

Second, employees may be more willing to self-disclose problems or

competency limitations when they are employed in more supportive work

units in that they may have fewer concerns about privacy or conﬁdentiality

(Bennett & Lehman, 2001). Indeed, previous research suggests that problem

concealment is more likely when individuals lack social support (Cramer,

1999) or – more speciﬁcally – fear gossip or distrust conﬁdentiality at work

(Bennett & Lehman, 1997; Hood & Duphorne, 1995). In contrast, group

members’ willingness to talk about problems or seek out help tends to be

greater in groups characterized by a more supportive climate (Bennett,

Lehman, & Reynolds, 2000 ). In examining the extent to which several of

these unit climate factors were associated with either indivi dual’s own help-

seeking or encouraging others to seek he lp, Bennett and Lehman (2001)

found that members of work groups characterized by stronger privacy

regulation climates were signiﬁcantly more likely to both themselves seek

help and encourage others to do so. Moreover, they found that both privacy

regulation and intervention climates could be signiﬁcantly enhanced by

means of various team-building interventions.

Taken together, these two streams of research suggest that individual

beliefs and expectancies regarding help-seeking are likely to at least partially

mediate the association be tween unit normative, privacy regulation, and

peer intervention climates (on the one hand), and an individual’s attitudes

toward seeking help (on the other).

Finally, the model also speciﬁes that individual differences and contextual

factors are also likely to interact with problem type in shaping need

awareness and problem recognition (paths 5a–5c). Such interaction effects

are grounded on the counseling and psychotherapy literatures and, in

particular, on Kanfer’s (1970) model of self-regulation. This model suggests

PETER BAMBERGER74

that, on the basis of self-monitoring, individuals should – in principle –

become more aware of a problem as it increases in severity. That is, problem

severity provides the basic informational input driving problem awareness

and recognition. However, certain types of problems (e.g., substance abuse)

may inherently impose restrictions on the focused awareness needed for

individuals to view objective information as indicative of such a problem

(Nye, Agostinelli, & Smit h, 1999 )

Moreover, Kanfer’s model suggests that to the degree that no such

problem-based barriers to information ﬂow are imposed, for such

information to be interpreted as a problem, individuals must compare this

information to some internal and external standard and perceive some sort

of discrepancy. In this context, certain individual differences, such as those

having to do with dispositional self-awareness (Hull, 1981; Hull, Young, &

Jouriles, 1986) and resistance to change (Oreg, 2003), may also condition the

degree to which such informational inputs drive problem recognition. For

example, those less frequently engaging in self-reﬂection (a behavior

characteristic of more self-aware individuals) may be slower or less likely

to pick up on any change (relative to the past) in behavioral patterns or

performance-related outcomes. Similarly, to the extent that external

standards are such that no discrepancy is recognized (e.g., in those work

contexts in which such problems or conditions are viewed as ‘‘normal’’),

even severe problems may be less likely to be recognized as such. For

example, as noted earlier, Sonnenstuhl’s (1996) research on occupational

drinking cultures suggests that in occupations characterized by more

permissive alcohol-related norms, individuals may be less likely to recognize

any discrepancy between their behavior and that of others and thus be less

likely to recognize objective alcohol misuse as a problem.

3.2. Help-Seeking Attitudes, Need Recognition, and Actual Help-Seeking

Research suggests that both problem/need recognition and positive attitudes

toward seeking help are likely to be predictive of actual help-seeking behavior

and that each may condition the effect of the other on such behavior. For

example, most models of help-seeking for drinking problems include reference

to both some sort of readiness term (alternatively referred to as ‘‘recognition

that an alcohol problem exists’’; Pringle, 1982) or ‘‘readiness to be concerned’’

(Hingson, Merrigan, & Heeren, 1985) and some metric for attitudes and

beliefs about the efﬁcacy of help or treatment (Jordan & Oei, 1989). While no

study to date has directly tested the independent or interactive effects of

Employee Help-Seeking 75

problem recognition and attitudes toward seeking professional help in the

context of a single, multivariate model, logic suggests that even the most

positive attitudes toward help-seeking are unlikely to motivate an individual

to address that problem by soliciting assistance if he/she fails to recognize a

problem as such. Similarly, individuals recognizing the existence of a problem

may be less likely to solicit assistance to the extent that they retain less

positive attitudes toward help in general. Consequently, as indicated by paths

6a and 6b in Fig. 1, I propose that the link between attitudes toward seeking

help and actual help-seeking are likely to be ampliﬁed as a function of

problem/need awareness and recognition.

Still, it should be restated that problem recognition may not necessarily

result in the immediate solicitation of assistance from that person

(consultant) or service provider (e.g., employee assistance program) most

able to help. Rather, particularly in the case of help aimed at addressing an

emotional/psychological need or a more severe instrumental need, such

formal help-seeking is likely to be preceded by more informal help-seeking

(Wilcox & Birkel, 1983). For example, research on troubled workers suggests

that the link between problem recognition and actual help-seeking from a

professional source is often mediated by the solicitation of advice from one’s

informal social network (Bamberger & Sonnenstuhl, 1996). Wills (1983)

explains individuals’ tendency to ﬁrst turn to informal sources as being a

function of three factors: (a) these informal sources are familiar, inexpensive,

and proximate; (b) these sources allow for reciprocal exchange reducing the

sense of indebtedness; and (c) such help-seeking is generally perceived to be

less visible and ‘‘public’’ than help-seeking from a professional source.

Finally, work-based contextual factors are also likely to play a role in

determining the extent to which both attitudes toward seeking help and

problem/need recognition affect the likelihood of actual helping-seeking.

First, based on the work of Clark (1983), and as portrayed in path 7 of

Fig. 1, I posit that the link between problem recognition and help-seeking is

likely to be moderated by factors contributing to the development of more

communal-based relationships (as opposed to more instrumental exchange-

based relationships) in the workpl ace. This is because help-seeking is likely

to be enabled in those contexts in which the help-seeker assumes that he/she

will need not have to be able to immediately and directly reciprocate ( Rosen,

1983; Mansﬁeld, Addis, & Courtenay, 2005; Addis & Mahalik, 2003). As

noted earlier with regard to the impact of support climate, the ability to

more generally reciprocate over time to the broader social unit (as opposed

to the need to directly and immediately reciprocate to the individual

providing assistance) reduces the potential emotional costs of advice

PETER BAMBERGER76

solicitation in that concerns over becoming indebted are attenuated by the

fact that the social context is one in which favors are more easily and

routinely exchanged. Indeed, social network research has found that help-

seeking, particularly for high-stigma problems, is more prevalent in more

cohesive and reciprocity -friendly networks (Wilcox & Birkel, 1983).

Research on social networks and helping (Wills & DePaulo, 1991; Wilc ox

& Birkel, 1983) suggests that work units characterized by more enduring

social networks (i.e., experiencing lower rates of member turnover and

whose membership, as a result, is generally more stable) are likely to be

those in which individuals perceive a greater potential for reciprocity, thus

facilitating help-seeking. Logically, to the extent that a unit’s membership is

more in ﬂux, unit members are likely to ﬁnd it more difﬁcult to develop the

more dense social ties allowing for the assumption of recipr ocity, thus

reducing the likelihood of informal help-seeking (Wilcox & Birkel, 1983).

Second, the impact of attitudes toward help-seeking and actual help-

seeking behavior is also likely to be conditioned by the workplace context.

In particular, research on services utilization (Thom, 1986, 1987; Beckman

& Kocel, 1982) suggest s that the impact of individuals’ help-seeking

attitudes on actual help-seeking is likely to be conditioned by the presence or

absence of a variety of practical barriers to help-seeking such as the

geographic distance to the help-provider and the economic (as opposed to

psychological) cost of assistance. For example, in many work organizations,

insurance coverage for costs associated with mental health care may reduce

the saliency of economic barriers. In addition, the availab ility of employee

assistance (Larson, Eyerman, Foster, & Gfroerer, 2007) or member

assistance (Bacharach et al., 1994) services may further reduce such

practical barriers to help-seeking in that these programs are staffed by

individuals speciﬁcally trained to work with help-seekers, service providers,

and insurance carriers to resolve not only insurance and cost-related factors

but also issues related to proximity and childcare as well.

Unfortunately, however, in many organizations, awareness of and trust in

such services and programs may vary from unit to unit, with awareness and

trust greater in those units led by either supervisors who are themselves

aware and supportive of the use of such beneﬁts and servi ces or whose

members have effectively utilized such beneﬁts or services in the past

(Bacharach et al., 1994; Milne, Blum, & Roman, 1994). Social inﬂuence and

social information processing theories (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978) suggest

that individuals employed in units characterized by low awareness or trust in

such beneﬁts and services are themselves less likely to be aware of the

availability of such beneﬁts or services from their employer and union, or if

Employee Help-Seeking 77

aware, skeptical of the quality or trustworthiness of such programs. For

these individuals, therefore, even a combination of problem/need recogni-

tion and positive attitudes toward seeking help may be insufﬁcient to

overcome such practical barriers, thus reducing the probability that the

employee will seek assistance and increasing the lag time before the

individual does so (Milne et al., 1994; Lee, 1997).

3.3. Summary

The model presented above attempts to integrate many of the individual-

level and contextual factors inﬂuencing employee help-seeking behavior

within the framework of two theories of human behavior, namely, the TRA

(Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980) and IPT (Anderson, 1982). While complex, the

model attempts to depict how the decision to seek help is likely to unfold in

a work context. As noted, the relationships among particular variables

embedded in this model are likely to vary depending on the nature of the

problem for which help may be sought (e.g., a highly egocentric and

stigmatized, emotional/psychological problem, such as an alcohol use

disorder, versus an instrumental problem, such as identifying the source of a

bug in a computer program). However, the overall framework may be used

by both researchers and practitioners to better understand the complex

network of multilevel factors potentially inﬂuencing he lp-seeking decisions

and the way in which they may do so.

4. CONSEQUENCES OF EMPLOYEE HELP-SEEKING

Understanding how individual, problem-related, and organizational factors

combine to inﬂuence the likelihood or frequency of help-seeking, we next turn

our attention to the implications of help-seeking. In this section, I will review

the research on two main outcomes relevant to organizations and their

members, namely, individual and team performance and employee well-being.

4.1. Help-Seeking and Performance

Although many researchers argue that employee help-seeking is a largely

beneﬁcial and productive organizational behavior (Ashford, 1986; Morrison,

1993; Tyre & Ellis, 1993), the social psychology and management literatures

PETER BAMBERGER78

suggest that these effects may not necessarily have universally positive effects

on individual and team/group performance. Indeed, a number of studies

suggest that frequent seeking of assistance (George, 1977) or seeking of

assistance on easy tasks (Stone, 1988) may in fact be detrimental to

performance.

In terms of the positive implications of help-seeking at the individual level,

instrumental help-seeking is likely to yield beneﬁcial performance effects

in that conceptually, it is directly tied to the notions of learning, uncer-

tainty reduction, and information elaboration (West, 2000; van Ginkel, &

van Knippenberg, 2008). Indeed, as noted by Nadler et al. (2003), many of

the mechanisms by which organizational members learn involve help-

seeking activities such as approaching colleagues to seek ideas (Allen, 1977),

obtaining expert advice (Eisenhardt, 1989), or requesting feedback or

information (Ashford, 1986; Morrison, 1993). For example, Morrison

(1993) argues that help-seeking (particular in the form of information

solicitation) is likely to have a positive impact on job performance in that it

reduces the level of uncertainty faced by such individuals. Building on the

notion that by seeking assistance employees are able to more rapidly gain

a better and more accurate understanding of their job and work context,

Morrison argues that the resulting reduction in work-related uncertainty

allows individuals to better understand role expectations and source-needed

job resources, thus generating enhanced job performance. Indeed, using data

drawn from 240 newly recruited accountants, Morrison (1993) demonstrates

that the overall frequency of information-seeking was highly predictive of

subsequent levels of newcomer job performance, explaining nearly 10

percent of the variance in that outcome. No less important, she found that

the overall frequency of information-seeking was associated with lower

levels of newcomer turnover intentions.

The seeking of emotional help has also been found to be associated with

enhanced individual performance. As noted by Bacharach et al. (2005), the

interpersonal facilitation and helping at the root of supportive peer relations

have been fou nd to have an impact on both individual job performance

(Schauebroeck & Fink, 1998) and group and organizational performance

(see Podsakoff, MacKenzie Paine, & Bachrach, 2000 for a review). For

example, studying a sample of non-exempt employ ees, Podsakoff and

MacKenzie (1997, p. 266) found peer helping (e.g., ‘‘encouraging each other

when someone is down’’) to have a signiﬁcant positive impact on

organizational performance outcomes, explaining (along with two other

OCBs) 26 and 17 percent of the variance in these two outcomes respectively.

Similarly, using a sample of limited-menu restaurants, Walz and Niehoff

Employee Help-Seeking 79

(1996) found helping to explain 39, 15, and 20 percent of the variance across

restaurants in customer satisfaction, operating efﬁciency, and performance

quality, respectively. Moreover, a survey of 400 companies conducted by the

Gallup organization found that workers’ ability to form supportive

relationships at work to be among the most powerful of 12 indicators of

a highly productive workplace (Wall Street Journal, 2000). To the extent

that such supportive relations are established on the basis of peer-based

help-seeking, it is reasonable to assume that the performance beneﬁts of

help-seeking are not limited to only instrumental forms of assistance.

Similarly, at the team or group level, the interdependent nature of relations

among team members is such that to achieve high performance, team

members have little choice but to develop helping dynamics in which the less

expert team members are able to seek instrumental assistance from their

more expert peers (Van der Vegt & Van de Vliert, 2005). As noted by Van der

Vegt, Bunderson, and Oosterhof (2006, p. 878), in teams characterized by

members with varying competencies, ‘‘it is a common aspiration . . . to

increase the overall expertness of the team through the more expert members

helping the less expert members.’’ Moreover, recent research suggests that

help-seeking may enhance team performance by facilitating team creativity

(Hargadon & Bechky, 2006), learning (Holman, Epitropaki, & Fernie, 2001),

and the development of shared understandings regarding the nature of the

team task (van Ginkel & van Knippenberg, 2008).

However, while it is quite logical to assume that individual and team

effectiveness will increase as a function of member help-seeking, a number of

factors are likely to condition such an effect. That is, the positive impact of

help-seeking is likely to occur only if a number of conditions are met. First,

help-seeking is likely to generate enhanced levels of performance only to the

degree that the recipient of such requests for assistance accedes to them and

provides assistance. Those asked to provide assistance are not always willing

to do so, and their hesitation and refusal to provide such assistance may

signiﬁcantly increase the perceived psychological costs of help-seeking to the

help-seeker. Not only might unsuccessful help-seeking thus serve as a

negative inﬂuence on subsequent help-seeking by a given team member

(Anderson & Williams, 1996), from a game-theoretical pe rspective, it may

also generate tit-for-tat behavior , having negative implications on dyadic

relations and overall team cohesion (Axelrod & Dion, 1988; Erev & Roth,

1998).

Second, even if the recipient accedes to such a request, the assistance

provided may not result in any enhancement in performance if the person

from whom the help was sought is unqualiﬁed or unable to provide such

PETER BAMBERGER80

assistance. Indeed, recent studies (Nadler et al., 2003; Borgatti & Cross,

2003) suggest that the contribution of help-seeking to performance is largely

contingent on the instrumental value of the available assistance, with this

instrumental value itself being primarily determined by the task-relevant

experience of the helper. For example, Nadler and his colleagues (Nadle r

et al., 2003) found that helpers’ experience moderated the relationship

between help-seeking and supervisors’ evaluations of employees’ performance,

such that when the help-provider was perceived as more knowledgeable,

higher levels of help-seeking were associated with better performance.

Finally, as suggested by Nadler’s (1997, 1998) distinction between auto-

nomous, dependent, and avoidance styles of help-seeking (discussed earlier),

the frequency or intensity with which an individual seeks help may also

moderate its impact on individual and group performance. Very low levels of

help-seeking may reﬂect a pattern of habitual reluctance to approach others

for help, resulting in the chronic under-utilization of available resources and

inadequate levels of individual learning and competency development. In

contrast, very high levels of help-seeking may reﬂect a pattern of habitual

reliance on help, resulting in the chronic under-development of independent

competencies and misallocation of team resources particularly when inde-

pendent task completion serves as a viable alternative.

Research on help-seeking by students (Arbreton, 1998) suggests that

individuals who ask for help too quickly without ﬁrst trying to work on the

task themselves are excessive help-seekers and are unlikely to develop

autonomous problem-solving skills or master the task in question. However,

since students who avoid asking for the help they need may similarly

decrease the likelihood of future independent mastery, as suggested by Ryan

and Pintrich (1998, p. 117), the effects of help-seeking on learning and

performance may be maximized to the extent that individuals ‘‘ask for help

that is limited to the amount and type necessary to allow them to solve the

problem independently.’’ In this sense, the frequency of help-seeking may

have a curvilinear relationship with individual and group/team perfor-

mance, with moderate levels of help-seeking generating higher levels of

performance and low or high levels of help-seeking resulting in reduced

levels of performance.

In one of the few studies directly examining the effects of help-seeking

on individual performance, Nadler et al. (2003) tested for this curvilinear

relationship using a database of 165 work-based help-seeking interactions.

Their results indicated that up to a certain high level of help-seeking, the

more a target individual seeks help from one’s colleagues, the higher the

performance evaluations of that target by his/her superior. However,

Employee Help-Seeking 81

beyond that point, more frequent requests for help, rather than further

boosting performance, do just the opposite and are associated with more

negative supervisory evaluations of performance.

Similarly, in a more recent study examining the impact of the aggregate

level of help-seeking by team members on team performance, Geller et al.

(2008) also found evidence of this curvilinear relationship. Using social

network data drawn from the members of 125 development teams, they

found that teams reporting low and high levels of help-seeking were

evaluated by their department heads as largely ineffective, while teams with

a medium level of help-seeking were evaluated as highly effective. More

speciﬁcally, they found that teams characterized by high or low mean

member help-seeking frequencies did not effecti vely manage the work

processes and did not effectively utilize available team resources for coping

with time constraints and ﬁnancial difﬁculties in getting the work done and

accomplishing the team’s goals. In contrast, teams that were characterized

by an intermediate level of help-seeking by their members control led the

work process more effectively, with their members exploiting their time and

knowledge resources and advancing the team’s goals more effectively.

4.2. Help-Seeking and Employee Well-Being

Although there is some evidence that help-seeking is directly associated with

enhanced employee well-being, most of the research evidence suggests that

any linkage between the two is mediated by either the provision of help (be it

emotional or instrumental) or services utilization.

Focusing ﬁrst on the direct effects of help-seeking on well-being, a

number of studies suggest that both the willingness to seek help and the

simple act of help solicitation (regardless of whether help is provided or not)

may be beneﬁcial to the seeker. For example, Marcelissen, Winnbust, Bunk,

and De Wolff (1988) found willingness to seek help associated with lower

job-related stress. Similarly, Heaney, Price, and Rafferty (1995) found that

relative to a control group, employees participating in a training program

designed to enhance employees’ ability to mobilize support and help at work

subsequently experienced signiﬁcantly fewer depressive symptoms and less

somatization. Such direct effects on well-being may stem from the impact of

help-seeking on employee perceptions of their own ability to cope with

stressful circumstances. In particular, consistent with demand-control

models of stress (Karasek & Theorell, 1990), engaging in help-seeking may

provide employees with a greater sense of self-efﬁcacy and situational

PETER BAMBERGER82

control that, in turn, may attenuate the adverse effects of stress on employee

well-being. Alternatively, to the degree that such behavior may redirect the

employee’s attention away from the actual stressor and more toward

problem-focused coping and the support that (idea lly) he/she receives in

response to his/her help requests, help-seeking may decrease the perceived

saliency of the actual stressor (Heaney et al., 1995).

However, it is likely that the primary effects of help-seeking on employee

well-being are related to others’ attempts to accede to such help requests and

provide the requested assistance and, in particular, the beneﬁcial effects that

such helping and support appear to have on employee mental health.

Indeed, there is consistent evidence in the occupational health literature that

social support serves as a critical coping resource and that its provision

(a) plays a critical role in protecting employees from the harmful impact of

stressful job situations (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988; Viswesvaran,

Sanchez, & Fisher, 1999) and (b) generally enhances employees’ health

and emotional well-being (Antonucci, Fuhrer, & Jackson, 1990; Siebert,

Mutran, & Reitzes, 1999 ). From a resource ecology perspect ive (Hobfoll,

2002), this effect likely stems from the fact that when instrumental or

emotional support is provided in response to a help request, the recipient

experiences a gain in personal resources. Having an enhanced inventory of

resource armamentaria, recipients are likely to be in a better position to not

only cope with and adjust to stressful circumstances (refer Viswesvaran

et al., 1999) but also to reduce their exposure to such circumstances in the

future (Hobfoll, 2002).

Also likely is that informal help-seeking increases the probability of

services utilization and, in particular, the utilization of psychological

services speciﬁcally aimed at helping troubled employees such as employee

assistance programs. Indeed, as noted by others, despite the widespread

availability of such program s, utilization of these programs remains quite

low (Bennett & Lehman, 2001), and self-referral to such programs is even

more rare (Milne et al., 1994). Still, both ethnogra phic (Sonnenstuhl, 1996;

Bacharach et al., 1994) and survey (Milne et al., 1994; French, Roman,

Dunlap, & Steele, 1997) research point to the critical role played by

employee perceptions of program accessibility and conﬁdentiality. To the

degree that employees often turn to coworkers for advice on how to handle

a particular problem or need and these coworkers in turn shape their peer’s

impression of the program as a possible source of assistance, as noted

earlier, informal help-seeking and the provision of peer-based referral

assistance are likely to play key roles linking help-seeking to servi ces

utilization and, ideally, problem resolution.

Employee Help-Seeking 83

While the impact of help-seeking on employee well-being is signiﬁcant in

its own right, it is important to note the possible economic implications of

this linkage to employers as well. Employee physical or mental impairment

is estimated to cost American employers approximately 2.5 billion workda ys

each year (Kessler, Greenberg, Mickelson, Meneades, & Wang, 2001). To

the extent that early intervention may signiﬁcantly cut the number of

impairment days for many of the conditions examined, the encouragement

of employee help-seeking may have a direct impact on rates of employee

absenteeism and hence on productivity in general. For example, Stewart,

Ricci, Chee, Hahn, and Morganstein (2003) found that not including labor

costs associated with short- and long-term disability, US workers reporting

symptoms of major depression in the previous week cost employers an

estimated $44 billion per year in lost production time, an excess of $31

billion per year compared with peers without depression. Although the

study did not directly examine help-seeking among those with severe

depression symptomology, it did report that less than one-third of those

experiencing major depression symptoms had taken any medication in the

prior 12 months. Moreover, Charbonneau et al. (2005) report that workers

are generally hesitant to seek professional help for such problems,

suggesting the potentially key role that the encouragement of informal,

peer-based help-seeking might play in both helping such workers an d

reducing the associated costs to their employers.

5. CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS

FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Help-seeking, while relatively unexplored by HR scholars, is by no means a

‘‘foreign’’ concept to HR researchers and practitioners. Indeed, as noted

earlier, recent years have seen a signiﬁcant growth in the interest of HR

scholars in employee discretionary behavior (i.e., OCB), a large portion of

which is likely driven by help-seeking on the part of these employees’ peers

(Anderson & Williams, 1996; Burke et al., 1976). Similarly, much of the

work of HR practiti oners, be it in the area of career development, training,

employee assistance, or beneﬁts administration is in direct response to

employees’ requests for assistance.

Nevertheless, as evident from the review of the literature presented earlier,

research on help-seeking in organizations in general, and employee help-

seeking in particular, is still in its infancy. Consequently, while social

PETER BAMBERGER84

psychologists have identiﬁed many of the individual-level antecedents of

help-seeking, and epidemiologists and health sociologists have suggested a

number of core processes contributing to an individual’s decision to seek

help for some physical or emotional problem, we still know little about how

organizational and unit-level factors may condition the inﬂuence of these

individual factors or independently contrib ute to work-relevant help-seeking

processes or outcomes. Similarly, our knowledge of the direct and indirect

consequences of help-seeking on individual and organizational conse-

quences remains lim ited to a handful of studies focused largely on employee

information-seeking, feedback-seeking, and employee assistance services

utilization.

Consequently, although my primary intention in this chapter was to

review the current state of knowledge regarding employee help-seeking and

to propose at least one framework according to which research on its

antecedents might proceed, I believe that it is important to also call

attention to some of those help-seeking-related issues for which additional

research may be most pressing. Three of these issue s are theory-related while

the fourth is more methodological in nature.

5.1. Mode as Opposed to Frequency of Help-Seeking

As noted earlier, most of the help-seeking research to date has focused on

those factors inﬂuencing whether individuals seek help or how often they do

so. However, as suggested by Nadler (1997), it may also be important to

explain the mode of help-seeking, or in other words, why and how

employees opt for more dependent (as oppos ed to more autonomous help-

seeking), and the consequences of such choices. The distinction between

dependent help-seeking (aimed at immediate problem resolution) and

autonomous help-seeking (aimed at competency development) may be very

relevant to work organizations in that the type of help requested likely

inﬂuences the type of help provided (Bamberger & Levi, 2009). And to the

degree that assistance is aimed at solving the recipient’s immediate problem

as opposed to enhancing the recipient’s competencies for the longer term,

the implications on learning and long-term performance may be signiﬁcant

at the individual, team, unit, and organizational levels. For example, given

the impact of team information elaboration (van Ginkel & van Knippenberg,

2008), team learning (West, 2000), and absorptive capacity (Cohen &

Levinthal, 1990; Huber, 1999) on team performance (Ellis, 2006), the impact

of the type of help team member s seek from one another may have

Employee Help-Seeking 85

particularly salient implications for team performance (Van der Vegt et al.,

2006).

Recent research suggests that, at least in work teams, team-based pay

and, in particular, the manner in which this team -based pay is allocated may

have a signiﬁcant impac t on the type of help sought and provided by team

members (Bamberger & Levi, 2009). Nevertheless, we still know little about

the impact that other HR subsystems and processes – such as career

development and performance appraisal systems – might have on the type of

help peers request from one another. Similarly, research is needed on the

impact that su ch differential forms of help-seeking might have on

individual, team/unit, and organizational outcomes such as performance

and capacity development.

5.2. Provider Willingness Versus Ability in Sourcing Decisions

A second issue deserving of greater research attention concerns how

individuals make sourcing decisions when seeking help. More speciﬁcally,

given that organizational members vary in their level and type of expertise,

just how much peer helping is able to enhance individual and work unit

performance is likely to depend on the degree to which unit members

optimally source assistance from within their organization or work unit

(Nadler et al., 2003; Van der Vegt et al., 2006). That is, assuming that work

units are composed of individuals with varying knowl edge skills and abilities

(KSAs), task performance is likely to be enhanced to the degree that unit

members needing aid source such assistance from those individuals

possessing the greatest knowledge about or experience with the matter of

concern. Yet, as the literature on advice network centrality (Klein, Lim,

Saltz, & Maye r, 2004) suggests, while KSAs do play somewhat of a role in

advice-sourcing decisions, other factors unrelated to the alternative sources ’

relative ability (such as provider’s perceived willing ness; Flynn & Lake,

2008) appear to play a far more signiﬁcant role.

The fact that unit members may often make their advice-sourcing

decisions on the basis of factors other than the quality of the advice likely to

be received reﬂects a basic dilem ma in help-seeking. Alt hough researchers

have acknowledged that work units and teams in a variety of contexts such

as software development and surgery may suffer as a result of members’

tendency to sub-optimally source advice from among their colleagues,

this issue has received little direct attention in the organizational and

PETER BAMBERGER86

psychological literatures (Edm ondson, 2003). Moreover, while research in

the area of demographic diversity suggests that demographic dissimilarity

may be the basis for many sub-optimal help-seeking behaviors (e.g.,

Riordan & Shore, 1997 ; Bacharach et al., 2005), little research has explored

the relationship between such dissimilarity and effective help sou rcing.

5.3. Temporal Aspects: When and How Long before Help is Sought

Third, few studies have examined the temporal aspects of helping, This is

surprising given that as noted earlier, the timing of help-seeking can be

critical. For example, when he lp is sought, particularly for those health-

related problems for which early intervention is key (e.g., breast cancer), it

can mean the difference between life and death. Similarly, whether

employees seek help for a task-related problem (e.g., a loan ofﬁcer unsure

about how to handle a loan request from a major client having cash ﬂow

problems) when the problem is in its nascent stage or wait until it has

already developed into a more complex and multifaceted issue potentially

affecting multiple organizational units, can have tremendous implications

for a ﬁrm’s bottom line.

Our understanding of the temporal implications of help-seeking is limited

primarily to health-related research. Thus, for example, research on help-

seeking for substance abuse problems indicates that individuals often need

to experience signiﬁcant alcohol-related problems for four or ﬁve years

before they are able to overcome denial and seek assistance (Thom, 1986,

1987). While such research suggests time delays in help-seeking can have

signiﬁcant performance implications for employees, managers, and employ -

ers, research has yet to offer even rough estimates of the ﬁnancial or cost-

related milestones that need to be met (no less the time that needs to pass)

before employees will seek help for particular types of instrumental

problems experienced at work. In general, the utility-based models of

psychological cost versus instrumental beneﬁt generated by social psychol-

ogists provide a basic framework for identifying what factors are likely to

quicken the pace or serve as obstacles to more rapid help-seeking. However,

this perspective has yet to be translated into a model demonstrating how

particular individual and dyadic characteristics, along with problem

characteristics and situational factors, might inﬂuence the amount of time

between problem emergence and actual help-seeking.

Employee Help-Seeking 87

5.4. Methodological Challenges

Finally, as noted earlier, much of the research on help-seeking has focused on

one of three types of research methods, namely, (a) student-based laboratory

experiments in which one or two individual, problem-related, or situational

characteristics are manipulated; (b) retrospective, often clinical studies of those

already under care; and (c) cross-sectional studies of individuals’ (often

students’) help-seeking attitudes or intentions to seek help. Each one of these

three approaches has its own particular weakness. For example, while useful in

determining the causal impact of certain antecedents on whether help is

sought, such experimental research is limited in its generalizability to the

workplace in that while workers’ help-seeking is likely inﬂuenced by the

dynamics of peer relationships established months if not years earlier, such

dynamics are difﬁcult if not impossible to replicate in a university laboratory.

Similarly, as noted by Grant (1997), retrospective/clinical studies are also often

limited in their external validity in that it is difﬁcult to assume that attitudes,

perceptions, and cognitions of those ultimately seeking help are similar to

those who have yet to do so. Finally, in the case of cross-sectional studies,

questions regarding the causal relations among study variables remain.

In this sense, there is a real need for prospective research in help-seeking in

which the complex ‘‘tango’’ between help-seekers and potential providers can

be monitored and tracked over time. One means of doing this might involve

diary or ‘‘palm’’ studies in which employees are asked – at random points of

time during the day – to respond to a brief questionnaire (Bolger, Davis, &

Rafaeli, 2003 ). Such an approach may be well-suited for research on instr-

umental help-seeking. However, because employees may be more reluctant to

respond to questions about how they seek help for ego-related or stigmatized

problems, researchers applying such an approach to examine help-seeking for

more emotional concerns may need to ﬁrst establish their credibility with the

workforce to be studied to reduce the potential risks of sample bias.

Another alternative might be to use a social network approach in which

employees, rather than reporting on their own h

Employee help-seeking: Antecedents, consequences and new insights for future research

Abstract and Figures