Frontline leaders are often expected to provide help to their team members, especially in stressful situations such as when employees are experiencing customer mistreatment. Providing help to team members fulfils a central role for frontline leaders and may reinforce their leader identity endorsement, a malleable construct within leader identity research that we conceptualise as a resource that aids leader emergence and other positive outcomes. Drawing from Conservation of Resources theory, we argue that helping behaviours can have different effects on actors. Specifically, emotion and task helping are resource investment strategies as leaders perceive they are making a positive impact to mistreated members. When leaders view themselves as effective and influential, they are more inclined to embrace their identities and report greater leader identity endorsement. Alternatively, leaders seeking to protect resources may avoid helping others, which can lead to poorer well-being and weaker endorsement of their leader identity. To examine these relationships, we conducted a three-wave study of 306 frontline supervisors. Findings show that emotional helping behaviours, but not task helping, led to greater leader identity endorsement through perceived social impact. Avoidance behaviours led to worse endorsement through emotional exhaustion. These findings advance our understanding of the differential effects of helping behaviours on actors, rather than recipients, and helps us understand how psychosocial demands influence leader identity endorsement among frontline staff.
