과거 도움행동이 향후 도움 교환 관계에 미치는 영향 및 친사회적 동기의 조절효과

Interpersonal help giving and seeking is one of the important employee behaviors that promotes positive organizational functioning. The reciprocity principle drawn from social exchange theory suggests that help given will be reciprocated by help recipients over the long term. However, help exchanges among employees may often be asymmetric, as recipients may not always reciprocate in equal measure and help givers may not always seek assistance from those they have helped in the past. This paper examines the exchange relationships in help seeking and giving between help givers and recipients. The reciprocity principle, which forms the bedrock of social exchange theory, has been built on the premise that help recipients will feel obligated to the party who provided favors and repay the favors. In addition, the expectation based on norms of reciprocity is that the help recipients will provide equivalent levels of benefits to the givers when they ask them to reciprocate past favors. Following the norm of reciprocity, we propose that person A’s help giving to person B is positively related to A’s willingness to seek help from B and B’s willingness to help A. We further suggest that A’s prosocial motive moderates the relationship between A’s helping B and A’s willingness to seek help from B, and the relationship between A’s helping B and B’s willingness to help A. The givers and the recipients sometimes fail to reach a mutual understanding in that the perceived value of the favors granted by the givers may differ from how much worth the recipients attach to help received. Such asymmetries in perception of the value of help provided may depend on givers’ prosocial motive and the likely impact they have on recipient’s interpretations the obligations incurred by accepting such assistance. From this perspective, we argue that A’s prosocial motive weakens the relationship between A’s helping B and A’s willingness to seek help from B whereas it strengthens the relationship between A’s helping B and B’s willingness to help A. We tested our theoretical model using a data set of 1,640 dyadic exchange relationships in an organization. The results were consistent with the reciprocity predictions that past help giving is positively related to the help seeking and giving intention between exchange partners. Furthermore, we found that givers’ prosocial motive weaken the positive relationship between providing help and A’s willingness to seek help form B. However the moderating effect of A’s prosocial motive on the relationship between A’s helping B and B’s willingness to help A was not significant. Finally, we discussed theoretical contributions and practical implications of these findings.