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Icing on the cake or the fishbone in the throat? the proactive and reactive helping-up on the supervisor’s feeling of status threat
Author(s)
Date Issued
2025
Conference
Citation
Zhang, R., Li, A., & Zhou, M. (14 Jun 2025). Icing on the cake or the fishbone in the throat? the proactive and reactive helping-up on the supervisor’s feeling of status threat. 11th IACMR Biennial Conference 2025, Xi’an, China.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Literature on helping has mainly focused on peers as recipients. However, another important target, supervisors, is largely overlooked. Owing to increasing emphasis on supervisor-subordinate relationship management and the difference between providing upward influence (i.e., helping the supervisor who has higher status) and horizontal influence (i.e., helping peers who have similar status), investigating helping behaviors directed at the supervisor (i.e., helping-up) and its consequences merit empirical attention. We adopt a dichotomy of proactive vs. reactive helping to examine how task-focused helping-up affects the supervisor-subordinate interaction process and subsequent workplace outcomes. Specifically, drawing upon the social exchange perspective and social self-preservation theory under the umbrella of social-relational framework, we propose that task-focused proactive helping-up engenders a supervisor’s feeling of status threat under high supervisor narcissism and high subordinate social dominance, respectively. Task-focused reactive helping-up negatively leads to a supervisor’s feeling of status threat. Status threat further negatively leads to supervisor’s performance evaluation of the subordinate. A three-wave data from 1200 dyads of head nurse (help recipients) and nurses (help givers) from hospitals supported our hypotheses. Our research extends people’s understanding of helping supervisors and proffer counterintuitive knowledge of a supervisor’s reactions—feeling of status threat—to subordinates’ task-related proactive help.
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