Linking employee helping behavior to social status: the mediating mechanism of relational uncertainty

Abstract

Abstract Helping behavior is commonly viewed as beneficial in organizations, yet its status implications may depend not only on how much help employees provide, but also on how helping is reciprocated within coworker relationships. Drawing on social exchange theory and social identity theory, this study conceptualizes coworker helping as a dyadic exchange pattern jointly shaped by help given and help received. We distinguish among balanced, generous, and stingy helping patterns and examine how these patterns influence social status through relational uncertainty. Using round-robin, two-wave data from 216 employees in 36 teams, we apply polynomial regression and response surface analysis. The results show that when help given and help received are balanced, higher overall levels of helping are associated with lower relational uncertainty. By contrast, relational uncertainty increases sharply as helping becomes increasingly stingy, that is, when employees receive substantially more help than they provide. Relational uncertainty, in turn, is negatively associated with social status and mediates the relationship between helping patterns and status. This study advances research on helping behavior by shifting attention from individual prosocial acts to reciprocal exchange configurations and identifies relational uncertainty as a mechanism through which coworker helping shapes status attainment.