Abstract:

This project addresses the limitation of traditional literature on helping decision-making, which excessively focuses on transient "helping behavior." This project considers helping decision-making in the workplace as a social venture investment decision process, which involves a series of steps corresponding to dynamic psychological contracts. This includes preparation, strategic conception, and follow-up adjustment when the help giver and the help seeker sign contracts for help in the workplace. Simultaneously, a crucial task of managers is to create an environment that promotes employees' mutual help in the organization. Furthermore, the project proposes that human resource management practice can create and maintain an appropriate investment environment within the organization. This environment can boost social venture investment decision among staff and encourage them to accept social investment risk in workplace helping decision-making.
Based on the above ideas, this project will be conducted in two parts, comprising of four studies. In the first part, based on the dynamic psychological contract theory, the interview and case study methods will be used to develop the process model of workplace helping decision-making (Study 1). The workplace helping decision-making process proposedly includes six steps: heeding the dilemma of the help seeker, explaining the help seekers’ dilemma, confirming whether and how much responsibility individuals have to assist the help seeker, formulating strategies to assist the help seeker, implementing helping behavior, and adjusting further helping decisions based on the reflection of previous helping results. This project then focus on the last step, which is the main difference between our workplace helping decision-making model and those of previous research. This project will use a daily-diary survey to explore how help givers would reflect the feedback of help seekers and adjust further help based on their reflection (Study 2). In the second part, based on the above proposed six-step model of helping decision-making in the workplace, human resource management practice is regarded as an important environmental factor that influences individuals to conduct social venture investments, such as helping decision-making in the workplace. Using the multi-wave survey method, this project focuses on the influential mechanism of two key variables of human resource management practice on helping decision-making in the workplace: job design (Study 3) and salary management (Study 4). Specifically, Study 3 examines the mediating role of work engagement between job characteristics and workplace helping decision-making, and the moderating mechanism of task interdependence on this mediating process. Study 4 explores the mediating role of team identity between team performance payment and workplace helping decision-making, and the moderating mechanism of organizational identity on the mediating role of team identity.
Through the above four studies, this project will make the following theoretical and practical contributions. Theoretically, from the dynamic psychological contract perspective, this project regards the workplace helping decision-making process as a social venture investment decision process, thus providing a new theoretical perspective for literatures in the field of help. Thus, this project addresses the limitation of previous literatures focusing on "helping behavior," which is a transient behavior, and instead regards help in the workplace as a decision-making process. Therefore, future researchers could further explore this process and find more effective ways to encourage workplace helping behavior. Moreover, previous studies conventionally applied the psychological contract theory to explain the relationship between organizations and employees. This project is the first to adopt the psychological contract theory to elucidate the relationship between employees in the workplace, thus expanding the boundaries of the psychological contract theory. Regarding practice, this project examines the antecedents of the decision-making process of help in the workplace from different modules of human resource management, which can guide the practice of human resource management and promote employees’ mutually helping behavior.

Key words: helping decision-making, social venture investment, dynamic psychological contract, resource allocation framework