When do employees help abused coworkers? It depends on their own experience with abusive supervision

Past research has documented mixed findings about whether employees help abused co-workers: some studies found that employees are less likely to help abused co-workers, whereas others found the opposite. To explain these inconsistent findings, we consider the role of employee’s own experiences with abusive supervision as a boundary condition. We propose competing hypotheses based on two frameworks. According to the altruistically motivated view of helping, employees help others because they empathize with others’ negative situation. Thus, employees who have experienced abuse themselves would be better able to empathize with their abused co-workers, and thus help these co-workers more. By contrast, according to the egoistically motivated view of helping, employees help others because they want to reduce experienced negative emotions. Thus, employees who have experienced abuse themselves would feel less guilt and shame upon seeing their co-workers being abused, which in turn reduces their help towards abused co-workers as they do not need to relieve negative emotions (i.e., guilt and shame). Two experiments and a multi-wave, multi-source field study support the altruistically motivated view of helping. Our research advances the field’s understanding of how organizations can prevent the spiral of destructive behaviour in the workplace.