10875: Dare to Seek Help? Decreased Status Striving Prevents Low Performers from Autonomous Help-Seeking (session 25630)

In the modern workplace, employees face growing work demands that make it difficult for many of them to thrive at work without seeking help from colleagues. Among various types of workplace support, autonomy-oriented helping has been found as an effective way for facilitating skill development and boosting employee performance, hence is particularly beneficial for employees who struggle to meet performance expectations, such as low performers. However, despite the instrumental value of autonomy-oriented helping, less is understood about the factors that prevent low performers from soliciting such help. By integrating insights from the social rank perspective of status and the literature on the dual-type view of helping, we identify low performer’s reduced status striving motivation as a novel barrier for them to seek autonomy-oriented helping, as well as the reinforcing role of low performer paranoia. Utilizing an experimental causal chain design (Studies 1A and 1B) as well as multi-source multi-wave field data from two real-estate firms (Study 2), we found progressive support for our theoretical model. Our research provides important theoretical and practical implications on low performer’s workplace challenges associated with autonomous help-seeking.

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