Seeking help from followers is a common leadership practice. However, a systematic understanding of its potential downsides and the critical contingencies is lacking. Integrating attribution theory, we incorporate employee attributions into our model of leader help-seeking to shed light on when this practice may backfire. Moreover, we link leader help-seeking to employee social undermining and negative gossip through the mediating role of perceived leader effectiveness to explicate how employees may react to such requests from their leaders. We first identify three distinct attributions (Study 1) that employees make (i.e., leader overwhelming workload attributions, leader incompetence attributions, and employee competence attributions) and develop a scale (Study 2) to measure these attribution dimensions. We then conduct two field studies (Study 3 and Study 4) to test our research model. The results support our hypotheses that employees’ reactions to leader help-seeking are contingent upon their attributions. Leader overwhelming workload attributions buffer the negative impact of leader help-seeking on employees’ perceived leader effectiveness, whereas leader incompetence attributions accentuate the negative relationship between leader help-seeking and perceived leader effectiveness. Furthermore, perceived leader effectiveness is negatively associated with social undermining and negative gossip targeted toward leaders. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings.
