A dyadic model of motives, pride, gratitude, and helping

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2315
• Author: You Jin (YJ) Kim,Linn Van Dyne,Stephanie M. Lee
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Published date: 01 December 2018

RESEARCH ARTICLE

A dyadic model of motives, pride, gratitude, and helping

You Jin (YJ) Kim

1

|Linn Van Dyne

2

|Stephanie M. Lee

2

1

Department of Human Resource

Management, Fox School of Business, Temple

University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

2

Department of Management, Eli Broad

College of Business, Michigan State

University, East Lansing, Michigan

Correspondence

You Jin (YJ) Kim, Department of Human

Resource Management, Fox School of

Business, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.

Email: ykim@temple.edu

Summary

Although scholars emphasize the importance of dyadic interactions between helpers

and helping recipients, prior studies tend to focus on helpers and investigate why

they help and how they feel after helping. Thus, we lack understanding of the role

of recipients and how their motive attributions influence their affective responses

to receiving help. The purpose of this paper is to draw on the affect theory of social

exchange and focus on helpers and recipients of helping. Specifically, we develop and

test a dyadic model of helping that emphasizes motives and discrete affective

responses of both helpers and recipients to providing and receiving help. The model

also goes beyond most prior research by acknowledging repeated acts of helping

and demonstrates that helper pride and recipient gratitude interact to predict subse-

quent helping. Our research contributes to the helping literature by offering a more

complete model of helping that simultaneously accounts for motives and pride of

helpers and motive attributions and gratitude of recipients.

KEYWORDS

gratitude, helping, motives, pride

1|INTRODUCTION

Helping is defined as interpersonal actions directed toward maintain-

ing the status quo by supporting existing relationships and processes

(Van Dyne, Cummings, & McLean Parks, 1995). Consistent with this

definition, researchers have identified positive implications of helping,

such as predicting organizational effectiveness (Podsakoff, Whiting,

Podsakoff, & Blume, 2009), group performance (George &

Bettenhausen, 1990), and individual performance (Van Dyne & LePine,

1998) as well as individual health and well‐being (Penner, Midili, &

Kegelmeyer, 1997). Due to the benefits of helping, a significant

amount of research has investigated the reasons why individuals

engage in helping (Spitzmuller, Van Dyne, & Ilies, 2008). Over time,

scholars have begun to consider more complex combinations of pre-

dictors—including individual motives and affective states (Grant &

Mayer, 2009; Ilies, Scott, & Judge, 2006).

Although this body of work is impressive, our understanding

about why and how individuals engage in helping is still incomplete.

Ironically, although dyadic exchange processes form the core of

helping relationships, scholars have largely neglected the role of

the recipient in dyadic helping exchanges and have focused

primarily on the helper's perspective: why they help and how they

feel after helping (Bolino, Klotz, Turnley, & Harvey, 2013). With

the exception of a few studies (see Grant & Gino, 2010; Weinstein

& Ryan, 2010), surprisingly little empirical research has considered

contributions of both helpers and helping recipients. This oversight

is unfortunate because the affect theory of social exchange (Lawler,

2001) argues that social exchanges are dyadic, require two individ-

uals, and should include helping recipients. Further supporting the

need for dyadic research on helping, Krasikova and LeBreton

(2012, p. 741) noted that taking a unilateral approach to dyadic

processes neglects one of the two actors in social exchange, is

“theoretically deficient and engenders a model misspecification.”

Practically, this omission suggests that previous research‐based rec-

ommendations to managers and employees may be incomplete and

overly simplistic.

Accordingly, our primary goal is to draw on Lawler's (2001) affect

theory of social exchange to direct attention toward both helpers and

recipients by introducing and testing a dyadic model of helping. In

developing our dyadic model, we emphasize the role of motives and

affective states of both parties in dyadic helping interactions.

Supporting our view, Lawler (p. 323) noted that motives “provide

Received: 17 August 2017 Revised: 1 June 2018 Accepted: 8 June 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2315

J Organ Behav. 2018;39:1367–1382. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 1367

information on the intentions or orientation of others,”and Lawler and

Thye (1999, p. 229) noted that “while emotions signal the self in affect

control theory, they also may be communicated to others”(p. 229).

Specifically, we consider how helper motives and recipient motive

attributions respectively shape their affective responses to giving

and receiving help. Research on helping motives has special relevance

to the affective outcomes of helping because affective states are “sig-

nals within the exchange process, revealing the intentions of exchange

partners”(Lawler & Thye, 1999, p. 239). We also consider the implica-

tions of affective states of both helpers and recipients on subsequent

helping.

This research also seeks to make four additional contributions.

First, our dyadic model offers a more complete and nuanced system

of relationships for motives, affective states, and helping. Past

research has demonstrated that motives predict helping (Grant &

Mayer, 2009; Rioux & Penner, 2001; Weinstein & Ryan, 2010) and

that affective states predict helping (Dalal, 2005; Isen, Clark, &

Schwartz, 1976; Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). These streams

of research on helping motives and affective states, however, have

developed independently, and we argue that they are complementary

and represent distinctive parts of a singular process. This is consistent

with the affect theory of social exchange (Lawler, 2001), which pro-

poses that initial social exchanges can be driven by multiple motives

and that affective responses to initial social exchanges should be con-

sidered when examining subsequent social exchanges. Thus, we posit

that (a) helper motives drive initial helping, which influences helper

affective response; (b) recipient attributions for helper motives shape

their affective response to receiving help; and (c) the interaction of

helper and recipient affective responses to the initial helping interac-

tion drives subsequent helping. This offers a more complete represen-

tation of dyadic social exchanges and allows us to differentiate initial

helping from subsequent helping.

Second, we extend the multiple motives perspective on helping

(Grant & Mayer, 2009; Kim, Van Dyne, Kamdar, & Johnson, 2013;

Rioux & Penner, 2001) and consider the effects of motives on helpers

and recipients. To date, existing research has focused primarily on the

effects of motives on helpers (Halbesleben & Bowler, 2007), but we

know less about the interdependent nature of social exchange and

the effect of motives on recipients. To expand the multiple motives

perspective on helping, we identify two motives—autonomous

motives and other‐oriented motives—that have special relevance to

helping. Of the various types of helping motives, autonomous

motives and other‐oriented motives address the two requirements

for helping interactions to yield beneficial affective reactions for both

helpers and recipients. Specifically, both helpers and recipients per-

ceive their helping interactions more positively when helping is

autonomously driven and other‐oriented because individuals have

been socialized to value helping that is discretionary and intended to

benefit others (Organ, 1988). Importantly, our focus on autonomous

and other‐oriented motives is also consistent with Lawler's (2001)

emphasis on “voluntaristic relationship”(Lawler, 2002, p. 8) and “a

concern for other”(Lawler & Thye, 1999, p. 230). Thus, we argue that

helper autonomous and other‐oriented motives and recipient attribu-

tions for these two motives respectively influence helper pride and

recipient gratitude.

In addition, our study contributes to the understanding of how

discrete affective states impact helping. Given that helping has special

implications for the experience of positive affect compared with neg-

ative affect (Ilies et al., 2006), most helping research has focused on

overall positive affective states (Koopman, Lanaj, & Scott, 2016;

Weinstein & Ryan, 2010). Although this research is promising, general

conceptualizations of affective states neglect the more fine‐grained

utility of discrete affective states. Specifically, we focus on helper

pride, defined as a positive self‐focused emotion, and recipient grati-

tude, defined as a positive other‐focused emotion (Lawler, 2001, p.

323, table 1). Although helpers view themselves as responsible for

their initial helping interactions, recipients view helpers (but not them-

selves or situations) as responsible for initial helping interactions. Thus,

our focus on helper pride and recipient gratitude is consistent with

Lawler and Thye's (1999) assertion that helpers and recipients have

different roles (i.e., actors and responders) and reactions to social

exchange during their helping.

Our focus on discrete affective states of helpers and recipients

provides insights on how affective states of two parties can jointly

influence subsequent helping. Although researchers have suggested

and demonstrated that multiple affective states of one party can pre-

dict helping, existing models have treated these affective states as

independent, neglecting the possibility that they may interact (Lee &

Allen, 2002). In response, we highlight the importance of interactions

between the multiple affective states of helpers and recipients as pre-

dictors of subsequent helping. This interactive approach should shed

light on prior inconclusive results for positive affect–helping relation-

ships. Although most research demonstrates a positive relationship

between positive affect and helping (Isen et al., 1976), some studies

report negative or null relationships (Forest, Clark, Mills, & Isen,

1979; Miner & Glomb, 2010). We suggest that previous conflicting

results might be due to focusing on the higher order construct of pos-

itive affect and its main effect on helping instead of on more fine‐

grained, discrete affective states that may interact to influence

helping.

To summarize, this paper uses Lawler's (2001) affect theory of

social exchange as a theoretical lens that guides our dyadic model

where helper motives and recipient motive attributions predict pride

and gratitude after initial helping, which interact to drive subsequent

helping. Figure 1 illustrates our theoretical model.

2|THEORETICAL OVERVIEW AND

DEVELOPMENT OF HYPOTHESES

2.1 |Lawler's affect theory of social exchange

According to Blau (1964), social exchange is the actions of two indi-

viduals motivated by the general cognitive expectation of some

future return. Unlike economic exchanges, social exchange returns

are not specified in advance, and so reciprocity is not guaranteed.

Instead, each party involved in the exchange considers costs and

benefits of engaging in an ongoing social exchange relationship

(Emerson, 1987). A large body of research has examined these cog-

nitive processes (Kelley & Thibaut, 1978). Lawler (2001), however,

1368 KIM ET AL.