题　目：Saying “No” at Work: The Consequences of Help Request Rejection

嘉　宾：林佳, 副教授, 香港理工大学

主　持：李欣欣, 副教授,  上海交通大学

时　间：2024年5月10日(周五) 10:00-11:30

地　点：上海交通大学 徐汇校区安泰楼A305室

内容简介:

Over the past two decades, research has extensively explored the dark side of helping coworkers. Recognizing the personal costs associated with assisting others at work, researchers and executive coaches have advocated for employees to decline help requests at least sometimes, emphasizing the potential benefits of doing so. However, empirical examinations of the implications of rejecting coworkers’ help requests (i.e., help request rejection) at work remain rare. Drawing on identity threat theory, we question the prevailing notion that help request rejection benefits the request recipients and examine whether and when rejecting help requests might engender psychological burden (i.e., prosocial identity threat), which predicts downstream work-related consequences. In two studies, including a time-lagged field study and a pre-registered scenario-based experiment, we find that rejecting coworkers’ help requests results in higher prosocial identity threat, which then leads to disparate outcomes (i.e., increased public, but not private, helping and worse task performance). These effects are more pronounced in request recipients with a stronger helping identity or those who perceive a higher level of helping pressure within their work teams. Theoretical and practical implications for helping decisions, prosocial identity, and identity threat management are discussed.

演讲人简介：

Dr. Katrina Jia Lin is an Associate Professor of Management at the Faculty of Business at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from National University of Singapore in 2017. Dr. Lin’s research interests include coworker interpersonal interactions, status, emotions, and work-family interface. Her research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Journal of Business Ethics, among others.

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