directions for future research are discussed

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Evans D, Coad J, Cottrell K, et al. Public involvement in research: assessing impact through a realist evaluation. Southampton (UK): NIHR Journals Library; 2014 Oct. (Health Services and Delivery Research, No. 2.36.)

Public involvement in research: assessing impact through a realist evaluation.

Chapter 9 conclusions and recommendations for future research.

• How well have we achieved our original aim and objectives?

The initially stated overarching aim of this research was to identify the contextual factors and mechanisms that are regularly associated with effective and cost-effective public involvement in research. While recognising the limitations of our analysis, we believe we have largely achieved this in our revised theory of public involvement in research set out in Chapter 8 . We have developed and tested this theory of public involvement in research in eight diverse case studies; this has highlighted important contextual factors, in particular PI leadership, which had not previously been prominent in the literature. We have identified how this critical contextual factor shapes key mechanisms of public involvement, including the identification of a senior lead for involvement, resource allocation for involvement and facilitation of research partners. These mechanisms then lead to specific outcomes in improving the quality of research, notably recruitment strategies and materials and data collection tools and methods. We have identified a ‘virtuous circle’ of feedback to research partners on their contribution leading to their improved confidence and motivation, which facilitates their continued contribution. Following feedback from the HS&DR Board on our original application we did not seek to assess the cost-effectiveness of different mechanisms of public involvement but we did cost the different types of public involvement as discussed in Chapter 7 . A key finding is that many research projects undercost public involvement.

In our original proposal we emphasised our desire to include case studies involving young people and families with children in the research process. We recruited two studies involving parents of young children aged under 5 years, and two projects involving ‘older’ young people in the 18- to 25-years age group. We recognise that in doing this we missed studies involving children and young people aged under 18 years; in principle we would have liked to have included studies involving such children and young people, but, given the resources at our disposal and the additional resource, ethical and governance issues this would have entailed, we regretfully concluded that this would not be feasible for our study. In terms of the four studies with parental and young persons’ involvement that we did include, we have not done a separate analysis of their data, but the themes emerging from those case studies were consistent with our other case studies and contributed to our overall analysis.

In terms of the initial objectives, we successfully recruited the sample of eight diverse case studies and collected and analysed data from them (objective 1). As intended, we identified the outcomes of involvement from multiple stakeholders‘ perspectives, although we did not get as many research partners‘ perspectives as we would have liked – see limitations below (objective 2). It was more difficult than expected to track the impact of public involvement from project inception through to completion (objective 3), as all of our projects turned out to have longer time scales than our own. Even to track involvement over a stage of a case study research project proved difficult, as the research usually did not fall into neatly staged time periods and one study had no involvement activity over the study period.

Nevertheless, we were able to track seven of the eight case studies prospectively and in real time over time periods of up to 9 months, giving us an unusual window on involvement processes that have previously mainly been observed retrospectively. We were successful in comparing the contextual factors, mechanisms and outcomes associated with public involvement from different stakeholders‘ perspectives and costing the different mechanisms for public involvement (objective 4). We only partly achieved our final objective of undertaking a consensus exercise among stakeholders to assess the merits of the realist evaluation approach and our approach to the measurement and valuation of economic costs of public involvement in research (objective 5). A final consensus event was held, where very useful discussion and amendment of our theory of public involvement took place, and the economic approach was discussed and helpfully critiqued by participants. However, as our earlier discussions developed more fully than expected, we decided to let them continue rather than interrupt them in order to run the final exercise to assess the merits of the realist evaluation approach. We did, however, test our analysis with all our case study participants by sending a draft of this final report for comment. We received a number of helpful comments and corrections but no disagreement with our overall analysis.

• What were the limitations of our study?

Realist evaluation is a relatively new approach and we recognise that there were a number of limitations to our study. We sought to follow the approach recommended by Pawson, but we acknowledge that we were not always able to do so. In particular, our theory of public involvement in research evolved over time and initially was not as tightly framed in terms of a testable hypothesis as Pawson recommends. In his latest book Pawson strongly recommends that outcomes should be measured with quantitative data, 17 but we did not do so; we were not aware of the existence of quantitative data or tools that would enable us to collect such data to answer our research questions. Even in terms of qualitative data, we did not capture as much information on outcomes as we initially envisaged. There were several reasons for this. The most important was that capturing outcomes in public involvement is easier the more operational the focus of involvement, and more difficult the more strategic the involvement. Thus, it was relatively easy to see the impact of a patient panel on the redesign of a recruitment leaflet but harder to capture the impact of research partners in a multidisciplinary team discussion of research design.

We also found it was sometimes more difficult to engage research partners as participants in our research than researchers or research managers. On reflection this is not surprising. Research partners are generally motivated to take part in research relevant to their lived experience of a health condition or situation, whereas our research was quite detached from their lived experience; in addition people had many constraints on their time, so getting involved in our research as well as their own was likely to be a burden too far for some. Researchers clearly also face significant time pressures but they had a more direct interest in our research, as they are obliged to engage with public involvement to satisfy research funders such as the NIHR. Moreover, researchers were being paid by their employers for their time during interviews with us, while research partners were not paid by us and usually not paid by their research teams. Whatever the reasons, we had less response from research partners than researchers or research managers, particularly for the third round of data collection; thus we have fewer data on outcomes from research partners‘ perspectives and we need to be aware of a possible selection bias towards more engaged research partners. Such a bias could have implications for our findings; for example payment might have been a more important motivating factor for less engaged advisory group members.

There were a number of practical difficulties we encountered. One challenge was when to recruit the case studies. We recruited four of our eight case studies prior to the full application, but this was more than 1 year before our project started and 15 months or more before data collection began. In this intervening period, we found that the time scales of some of the case studies were no longer ideal for our project and we faced the choice of whether to continue with them, although this timing was not ideal, or seek at a late moment to recruit alternative ones. One of our case studies ultimately undertook no involvement activity over the study period, so we obtained fewer data from it, and it contributed relatively little to our analysis. Similarly, one of the four case studies we recruited later experienced some delays itself in beginning and so we had a more limited period for data collection than initially envisaged. Research governance approvals took much longer than expected, particularly as we had to take three of our research partners, who were going to collect data within NHS projects, through the research passport process, which essentially truncated our data collection period from 1 year to 9 months. Even if we had had the full year initially envisaged for data collection, our conclusion with hindsight was that this was insufficiently long. To compare initial plans and intentions for involvement with the reality of what actually happened required a longer time period than a year for most of our case studies.

In the light of the importance we have placed on the commitment of PIs, there is an issue of potential selection bias in the recruitment of our sample. As our sampling strategy explicitly involved a networking approach to PIs of projects where we thought some significant public involvement was taking place, we were likely (as we did) to recruit enthusiasts and, at worst, those non-committed who were at least open to the potential value of public involvement. There were, unsurprisingly, no highly sceptical PIs in our sample. We have no data therefore on how public involvement may work in research where the PI is sceptical but may feel compelled to undertake involvement because of funder requirements or other factors.

• What would we do differently next time?

If we were to design this study again, there are a number of changes we would make. Most importantly we would go for a longer time period to be able to capture involvement through the whole research process from initial design through to dissemination. We would seek to recruit far more potential case studies in principle, so that we had greater choice of which to proceed with once our study began in earnest. We would include case studies from the application stage to capture the important early involvement of research partners in the initial design period. It might be preferable to research a smaller number of case studies, allowing a more in-depth ethnographic approach. Although challenging, it would be very informative to seek to sample sceptical PIs. This might require a brief screening exercise of a larger group of PIs on their attitudes to and experience of public involvement.

The economic evaluation was challenging in a number of ways, particularly in seeking to obtain completed resource logs from case study research partners. Having a 2-week data collection period was also problematic in a field such as public involvement, where activity may be very episodic and infrequent. Thus, collecting economic data alongside other case study data in a more integrated way, and particularly with interviews and more ethnographic observation of case study activities, might be advantageous. The new budgeting tool developed by INVOLVE and the MHRN may provide a useful resource for future economic evaluations. 23

We have learned much from the involvement of research partners in our research team and, although many aspects of our approach worked well, there are some things we would do differently in future. Even though we included substantial resources for research partner involvement in all aspects of our study, we underestimated how time-consuming such full involvement would be. We were perhaps overambitious in trying to ensure such full involvement with the number of research partners and the number and complexity of the case studies. We were also perhaps naive in expecting all the research partners to play the same role in the team; different research partners came with different experiences and skills, and, like most of our case studies, we might have been better to be less prescriptive and allow the roles to develop more organically within the project.

• Implications for research practice and funding

If one of the objectives of R&D policy is to increase the extent and effectiveness of public involvement in research, then a key implication of this research is the importance of influencing PIs to value public involvement in research or to delegate to other senior colleagues in leading on involvement in their research. Training is unlikely to be the key mechanism here; senior researchers are much more likely to be influenced by peers or by their personal experience of the benefits of public involvement. Early career researchers may be shaped by training but again peer learning and culture may be more influential. For those researchers sceptical or agnostic about public involvement, the requirement of funders is a key factor that is likely to make them engage with the involvement agenda. Therefore, funders need to scrutinise the track record of research teams on public involvement to ascertain whether there is any evidence of commitment or leadership on involvement.

One of the findings of the economic analysis was that PIs have consistently underestimated the costs of public involvement in their grant applications. Clearly the field will benefit from the guidance and budgeting tool recently disseminated by MHRN and INVOLVE. It was also notable that there was a degree of variation in the real costs of public involvement and that effective involvement is not necessarily costly. Different models of involvement incur different costs and researchers need to be made aware of the costs and benefits of these different options.

One methodological lesson we learned was the impact that conducting this research had on some participants’ reflection on the impact of public involvement. Particularly for research staff, the questions we asked sometimes made them reflect upon what they were doing and change aspects of their approach to involvement. Thus, the more the NIHR and other funders can build reporting, audit and other forms of evaluation on the impact of public involvement directly into their processes with PIs, the more likely such questioning might stimulate similar reflection.

• Recommendations for further research

There are a number of gaps in our knowledge around public involvement in research that follow from our findings, and would benefit from further research, including realist evaluation to extend and further test the theory we have developed here:

• In-depth exploration of how PIs become committed to public involvement and how to influence agnostic or sceptical PIs would be very helpful. Further research might compare, for example, training with peer-influencing strategies in engendering PI commitment. Research could explore the leadership role of other research team members, including research partners, and how collective leadership might support effective public involvement.
• More methodological work is needed on how to robustly capture the impact and outcomes of public involvement in research (building as well on the PiiAF work of Popay et al. 51 ), including further economic analysis and exploration of impact when research partners are integral to research teams.
• Research to develop approaches and carry out a full cost–benefit analysis of public involvement in research would be beneficial. Although methodologically challenging, it would be very useful to conduct some longer-term studies which sought to quantify the impact of public involvement on such key indicators as participant recruitment and retention in clinical trials.
• It would also be helpful to capture qualitatively the experiences and perspectives of research partners who have had mixed or negative experiences, since they may be less likely than enthusiasts to volunteer to participate in studies of involvement in research such as ours. Similarly, further research might explore the (relatively rare) experiences of marginalised and seldom-heard groups involved in research.
• Payment for public involvement in research remains a contested issue with strongly held positions for and against; it would be helpful to further explore the value research partners and researchers place on payment and its effectiveness for enhancing involvement in and impact on research.
• A final relatively narrow but important question that we identified after data collection had finished is: what is the impact of the long periods of relative non-involvement following initial periods of more intense involvement for research partners in some types of research, particularly clinical trials?

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• Cite this Page Evans D, Coad J, Cottrell K, et al. Public involvement in research: assessing impact through a realist evaluation. Southampton (UK): NIHR Journals Library; 2014 Oct. (Health Services and Delivery Research, No. 2.36.) Chapter 9, Conclusions and recommendations for future research.
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How to Write the Discussion Section of a Research Paper

The discussion section of a research paper analyzes and interprets the findings, provides context, compares them with previous studies, identifies limitations, and suggests future research directions.

Updated on September 15, 2023

Structure your discussion section right, and you’ll be cited more often while doing a greater service to the scientific community. So, what actually goes into the discussion section? And how do you write it?

The discussion section of your research paper is where you let the reader know how your study is positioned in the literature, what to take away from your paper, and how your work helps them. It can also include your conclusions and suggestions for future studies.

First, we’ll define all the parts of your discussion paper, and then look into how to write a strong, effective discussion section for your paper or manuscript.

Discussion section: what is it, what it does

The discussion section comes later in your paper, following the introduction, methods, and results. The discussion sets up your study’s conclusions. Its main goals are to present, interpret, and provide a context for your results.

What is it?

The discussion section provides an analysis and interpretation of the findings, compares them with previous studies, identifies limitations, and suggests future directions for research.

This section combines information from the preceding parts of your paper into a coherent story. By this point, the reader already knows why you did your study (introduction), how you did it (methods), and what happened (results). In the discussion, you’ll help the reader connect the ideas from these sections.

Why is it necessary?

The discussion provides context and interpretations for the results. It also answers the questions posed in the introduction. While the results section describes your findings, the discussion explains what they say. This is also where you can describe the impact or implications of your research.

Adds context for your results

Most research studies aim to answer a question, replicate a finding, or address limitations in the literature. These goals are first described in the introduction. However, in the discussion section, the author can refer back to them to explain how the study's objective was achieved. 

Shows what your results actually mean and real-world implications

The discussion can also describe the effect of your findings on research or practice. How are your results significant for readers, other researchers, or policymakers?

What to include in your discussion (in the correct order)

A complete and effective discussion section should at least touch on the points described below.

Summary of key findings

The discussion should begin with a brief factual summary of the results. Concisely overview the main results you obtained.

Begin with key findings with supporting evidence

Your results section described a list of findings, but what message do they send when you look at them all together?

Your findings were detailed in the results section, so there’s no need to repeat them here, but do provide at least a few highlights. This will help refresh the reader’s memory and help them focus on the big picture.

Read the first paragraph of the discussion section in this article (PDF) for an example of how to start this part of your paper. Notice how the authors break down their results and follow each description sentence with an explanation of why each finding is relevant. 

State clearly and concisely

Following a clear and direct writing style is especially important in the discussion section. After all, this is where you will make some of the most impactful points in your paper. While the results section often contains technical vocabulary, such as statistical terms, the discussion section lets you describe your findings more clearly. 

Interpretation of results

Once you’ve given your reader an overview of your results, you need to interpret those results. In other words, what do your results mean? Discuss the findings’ implications and significance in relation to your research question or hypothesis.

Analyze and interpret your findings

Look into your findings and explore what’s behind them or what may have caused them. If your introduction cited theories or studies that could explain your findings, use these sources as a basis to discuss your results.

For example, look at the second paragraph in the discussion section of this article on waggling honey bees. Here, the authors explore their results based on information from the literature.

Unexpected or contradictory results

Sometimes, your findings are not what you expect. Here’s where you describe this and try to find a reason for it. Could it be because of the method you used? Does it have something to do with the variables analyzed? Comparing your methods with those of other similar studies can help with this task.

Context and comparison with previous work

Refer to related studies to place your research in a larger context and the literature. Compare and contrast your findings with existing literature, highlighting similarities, differences, and/or contradictions.

How your work compares or contrasts with previous work

Studies with similar findings to yours can be cited to show the strength of your findings. Information from these studies can also be used to help explain your results. Differences between your findings and others in the literature can also be discussed here. 

How to divide this section into subsections

If you have more than one objective in your study or many key findings, you can dedicate a separate section to each of these. Here’s an example of this approach. You can see that the discussion section is divided into topics and even has a separate heading for each of them. 

Limitations

Many journals require you to include the limitations of your study in the discussion. Even if they don’t, there are good reasons to mention these in your paper.

Why limitations don’t have a negative connotation

A study’s limitations are points to be improved upon in future research. While some of these may be flaws in your method, many may be due to factors you couldn’t predict.

Examples include time constraints or small sample sizes. Pointing this out will help future researchers avoid or address these issues. This part of the discussion can also include any attempts you have made to reduce the impact of these limitations, as in this study .

How limitations add to a researcher's credibility

Pointing out the limitations of your study demonstrates transparency. It also shows that you know your methods well and can conduct a critical assessment of them.  

Implications and significance

The final paragraph of the discussion section should contain the take-home messages for your study. It can also cite the “strong points” of your study, to contrast with the limitations section.

Restate your hypothesis

Remind the reader what your hypothesis was before you conducted the study. 

How was it proven or disproven?

Identify your main findings and describe how they relate to your hypothesis.

How your results contribute to the literature

Were you able to answer your research question? Or address a gap in the literature?

Future implications of your research

Describe the impact that your results may have on the topic of study. Your results may show, for instance, that there are still limitations in the literature for future studies to address. There may be a need for studies that extend your findings in a specific way. You also may need additional research to corroborate your findings. 

Sample discussion section

This fictitious example covers all the aspects discussed above. Your actual discussion section will probably be much longer, but you can read this to get an idea of everything your discussion should cover.

Our results showed that the presence of cats in a household is associated with higher levels of perceived happiness by its human occupants. These findings support our hypothesis and demonstrate the association between pet ownership and well-being. 

The present findings align with those of Bao and Schreer (2016) and Hardie et al. (2023), who observed greater life satisfaction in pet owners relative to non-owners. Although the present study did not directly evaluate life satisfaction, this factor may explain the association between happiness and cat ownership observed in our sample.

Our findings must be interpreted in light of some limitations, such as the focus on cat ownership only rather than pets as a whole. This may limit the generalizability of our results.

Nevertheless, this study had several strengths. These include its strict exclusion criteria and use of a standardized assessment instrument to investigate the relationships between pets and owners. These attributes bolster the accuracy of our results and reduce the influence of confounding factors, increasing the strength of our conclusions. Future studies may examine the factors that mediate the association between pet ownership and happiness to better comprehend this phenomenon.

This brief discussion begins with a quick summary of the results and hypothesis. The next paragraph cites previous research and compares its findings to those of this study. Information from previous studies is also used to help interpret the findings. After discussing the results of the study, some limitations are pointed out. The paper also explains why these limitations may influence the interpretation of results. Then, final conclusions are drawn based on the study, and directions for future research are suggested.

How to make your discussion flow naturally

If you find writing in scientific English challenging, the discussion and conclusions are often the hardest parts of the paper to write. That’s because you’re not just listing up studies, methods, and outcomes. You’re actually expressing your thoughts and interpretations in words.

• How formal should it be?
• What words should you use, or not use?
• How do you meet strict word limits, or make it longer and more informative?

Always give it your best, but sometimes a helping hand can, well, help. Getting a professional edit can help clarify your work’s importance while improving the English used to explain it. When readers know the value of your work, they’ll cite it. We’ll assign your study to an expert editor knowledgeable in your area of research. Their work will clarify your discussion, helping it to tell your story. Find out more about AJE Editing.

Adam Goulston, PsyD, MS, MBA, MISD, ELS

Science Marketing Consultant

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26 Helping in Organizations: A Review and Directions for Future Research

Mark G. Ehrhart University of Central Florida Orlando, FL, USA

• Published: 10 January 2017
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Helping has long been a central component of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and yet our knowledge of the full spectrum of helping processes in organizations is limited. Most helping research in the OCB literature has focused on individuals’ tendencies to help across situations, including antecedents and outcomes of those general tendencies. Integrating across a number of related literatures on such topics as prosocial behavior, help seeking, feedback/advice seeking, and favor exchange, this chapter presents an integrative framework of helping processes organized around the key decisions of whether to seek help and whether to help when asked, as well as whether to offer help and whether to accept offered help. An exploration of the factors associated with these decisions identifies a number of topics that have not received full attention in the OCB literature, which can be studied across various types of help and levels of analysis.

Helping behavior has consistently been central to the idea of what makes for a good organizational citizen; as described by Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, and Bachrach (2000) , “Helping behavior has been identified as an important form of citizenship behavior by virtually everyone who has worked in this area” (p. 516). As interest in organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has increased ( Podsakoff, Whiting, Podsakoff, & Blume, 2009 ), so has interest in helping behavior. Spitzmuller and Van Dyne (2013) reported that the number of publications on helping in the management and applied psychology literatures during 2010 was over three times the number published in 2001. Given that helping has received so much attention in the literature, it would be expected that we should have a fairly strong understanding of helping processes in organizations; unfortunately, that is not entirely the case. Thus, the goal of this chapter is to show that there is much more to helping than has typically been addressed in OCB research, and thus there is still much work to be done to understand the who, what, when, why, and how of helping in organizations.

As depicted in Figure 26.1 , this chapter is framed around key questions about helping behavior that have been considered in the research literature. The circles in the framework represent decision points for either the help seeker or help giver, and the framework is focused on two key decisions that apply to most episodes of helping: the decision to seek help or not and the corresponding decision to give help or not. The framework also includes two less-studied decisions when there is no request for help: the decision to offer help and the subsequent decision to accept that offer or not.

The chapter begins with the general question of whether there are different types of help, as this question has implications for almost all other aspects of the helping process (as shown at the base of Figure 26.1 ). The next set of questions covered are toward the center of the framework, pertaining to the help that is given (the why, who, and when of helping), as this has been the primary focus of the current OCB literature. The chapter then shifts to the decision to seek help or not (i.e., the why, who, and when of help seeking), as well as the decision for the help provider to give help or not. Finally, the chapter discusses the outcomes of helping, including the outcomes of help seeking/receiving, reciprocation, and the outcomes of helping across multiple levels of analysis. The chapter closes with suggestions for future research based on the review and framework. Throughout, the chapter draws from not only the OCB literature but also the literatures on prosocial behavior, help seeking, feedback seeking, advice seeking, information seeking, favor exchange, organizational support, social networks, team processes, intergroup relations, and bystander intervention. By demonstrating the variety of perspectives on helping across these literatures, the hope is to stimulate further research and thinking on helping in the OCB literature.

A theoretical framework of helping processes in organizations

Are There Different Types of Help?

The starting point for the chapter is the help itself. In the OCB literature, helping was originally referred to as altruism ( Smith, Organ, & Near, 1983 ). Organ (1988) distinguished it from behaviors related to preventing work-related problems, referred to as courtesy, but these behaviors were later grouped under the general category of helping behavior, along with ideas of peacemaking and cheerleading ( Organ, Podsakoff, & MacKenzie, 2006 ; Podsakoff et al., 2000 ). In recent years, helping typically has been treated as a monolithic concept; it is already a category of the more general concept of OCB, and it is rarely broken down more specifically than that. Nevertheless, the reality is that the broad idea of helping encompasses a variety of types of help and can be discussed in terms of a number of characteristics. In addition, the type of help has implications for almost all of the other issues discussed in this chapter, as depicted in Figure 26.1 .

One primary distinction that has been made with regard to types of help is between instrumental help and emotional help. As described by Bamberger (2009) , instrumental help (which often includes informational help) tends to be more tangible and task related. In contrast, emotional help tends to be personal and less task related. Similar distinctions have been made between job-related and non-job-related support ( Bowling, Beehr, & Swader, 2005 ) and between task assistance and social and emotional support ( Mor Barak, Travis, Pyun, & Xie, 2009 ). In the OCB literature, the focus tends to be on instrumental help (see Settoon & Mossholder, 2002 , for one exception). For instance, items from one of the most commonly used helping measures in the OCB literature specifies helping with heavy workloads and work-related problems ( Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman, & Fetter, 1990 ). That being said, some helping items are less clear, only mentioning being “ready to lend a helping hand” ( Podsakoff et al., 1990 , p. 121). The Williams and Anderson (1991) scale for the very closely related concept of OCB targeted toward other individuals (or OCB-I) also has more of a mix of items, with some clearly being task focused and others seemingly more along the lines of emotional help (e.g., “Takes the time to listen to coworkers’ problems and worries” and “Takes a personal interest in other employees”).

Another distinction can be made between help that is prompted by a request for help versus help that is not. Research has suggested that the large majority of helping interactions are prompted by a request for help ( Burke, Weir, & Duncan, 1976 ; Kaplan & Cowen, 1981 ; Nadler, 1991 ). Requests for help are the primary focus of the literature on help seeking ( Bamberger, 2009 ) and closely tied to the related literatures on advice seeking ( Bonaccio & Dalal, 2006 ; Nebus, 2006 ), feedback seeking ( Anseel, Beatty, Shen, Lievens, & Sackett, 2015 ; Ashford, Blatt, & VandeWalle, 2003 ), and information seeking ( Borgatti & Cross, 2003 ), which are integrated throughout this chapter. Despite most help resulting from a direct response to a helping request, it is also possible that the help may be offered without such a request. For example, help may be offered in response to a recognized need in others without the recipient actually making the request (i.e., a coworker is aware of his or her peer’s heavy workload and makes an offer of assistance). Research has shown that proactively providing help to others without a request for assistance develops as early as 2 years of age ( Warneken, 2013 ). The responses of those who receive help are likely to differ depending on whether the help was in response to a request; this issue is discussed more in the section on the outcomes of receiving help. Along these lines, the characteristics of individuals who are willing to offer help without a request may be different from those who help as a direct result of a request.

Helping can also be categorized as to whether it is autonomy-oriented help or dependency-oriented help. In short, autonomy-oriented help involves giving the help recipient the tools he or she needs to solve similar problems in the future, whereas dependency-oriented help involves the help giver solving the problem for the help recipient ( Nadler, 2002 ). Thus, with dependency-oriented help, the help recipient has received a short-term benefit but will need similar support from a help giver should a similar problem occur in the future. Which kind of help the help recipient receives may depend on the type of help he or she requests from the help giver ( Komissarouk & Nadler, 2014 ), contextual factors such as pay structure ( Bamberger & Levi, 2009 ), and the attributions of the help giver ( Nadler & Chernyak-Hai, 2014 ), among other things.

A number of other categorization schemes for helping have been discussed in the research literature. For instance, Spitzmuller and Van Dyne (2013) distinguished between reactive helping for which the interest is in benefitting others and fulfilling their needs, and proactive helping, which is given to fulfill the helper’s own motives and thus is self-interested. McGuire (1994) identified four types of helping behaviors: (1) casual helping (relatively low cost to the helper), (2) substantial personal helping (higher cost to the helper), (3) emotional helping (intangible help based on close relationship), and (4) emergency helping (response to an acute need with high cost to the helper). Gross and McMullen (1983) made the distinction between necessary help (when a problem cannot be solved alone) and convenient help (when a problem can be solved alone, but help would make things go more quickly). Bolger and colleagues ( Bolger & Amarel, 2007 ; Bolger, Zuckerman, & Kessler, 2000 ) have distinguished between support that recipients are aware of (visible support) and support that is outside of their awareness or not interpreted as support (invisible support). Cain, Dana, and Newman (2014) discussed giving versus giving in, such that giving represents willing engagement in prosocial behaviors, whereas giving in represents the engagement in prosocial behaviors in response to social pressure or obligation.

Research on advice giving and advice taking from the decision-making literature has distinguished among several types of advice, which can be considered under the general concept of helping. Specifically, Dalal and Bonaccio (2010) identified five types of assistance decision makers may receive from advisors: (1) recommend for (advising the decision maker to take a particular course of action), (2) recommend against (advising the decision maker to avoid or not take a particular course of action, (3) information (providing information about the alternatives available to the decision maker without endorsing a specific choice), (4) decision support (suggesting alternative processes the decision maker may use for making the decision), and (5) social support (providing general socioemotional support and sympathy targeted toward the decision maker). Across two policy-capturing studies, they found that decision makers generally preferred information assistance as compared to the alternatives, and that the context (e.g., the type of decision to be made), characteristics of the advisor (e.g., expertise/credibility), and characteristics of the decision maker (e.g., gender and personality) influenced the preferred type of assistance.

The approaches thus far are categorizations of different types of help, but an alternative perspective is to view help as varying across a number of dimensions. Pearce and Amato (1980) proposed three dimensions of helping: (1) planned and formal versus spontaneous and informal, (2) serious versus nonserious, and (3) direct versus indirect. Help may also vary in its quality or the extent to which it is viewed as actually being helpful for the recipient. In other words, some help results in more benefits than other help, and the level of benefits that result will impact the recipient’s gratitude and response ( Malhotra, 2004 ; Wood, Brown, & Maltby, 2011 ). Along similar lines, some help may be more difficult, more challenging, or more costly for the help provider than other help ( Bartlett & DeSteno, 2007 ; Fritzsche, Finkelstein, & Penner, 2000 ). When it is clear that the help provider went substantially out of his or her way to provide the help or incurred substantial costs in order to provide the help, then the recipient is more likely to feel obligated and indebted to the help provided ( Greenberg, 1980 ). Help can be assessed on its ego-centrality (how central it is to self-worth) or how visible (i.e., public or private) the help is ( Nadler & Halabi, 2015 ). As another example, the beneficiaries of the help may vary ( Bamberger, 2009 ). Although much of the OCB literature on helping focuses on the extent to which one person helps other individuals, it is also possible that the help may benefit an entire work group or larger organizational entity. In fact, the category of OCB-O, or organizational citizenship behavior targeted toward the organization as a whole ( Williams & Anderson, 1991 ), could be reframed as individual helping behavior with the recipient being the organization as a whole. Finally and most recently, Golan and Bamberger (2015) identified three dimensions of helping behaviors in their qualitative research: (1) awareness (recognition of the existence of the problem), (2) activity (actively offering help versus passively participating when approached for help), and (3) responsiveness (the degree to which the helper acknowledges the need in a timely manner). Various configurations of these dimensions were then discussed in terms of possible helping behaviors. As is clear from this discussion, there are multiple possibilities for judging characteristics of help that is given. The general point is that not all help is the same, and the characteristics of the help may have important implications for whether it is performed and the extent of its impact.

Why Are People Helpful?

This question and the following two (who gives help and when people help) cover the most commonly researched ground in the OCB literature and are grouped into “help given” in Figure 26.1 . Note that although the framework in Figure 26.1 is primarily focused on specific episodes of help (i.e., specific requests for help and decisions to help or not help), most of the literature on predictors of OCB addresses overall tendencies across time. That is, the literature typically addresses predictors of the general tendency to help, rather than predictors specific to a particular request or situation. In addition, issues of motivation and other individual difference predictors are often grouped together in reviews of the OCB literature, but they are treated separately here in order to highlight the importance of understanding what motivates individuals to help and to parallel the help-seeking literature, which typically addresses the question of why people seek help as an independent issue.

When considering why individuals are helpful, it is difficult to avoid a discussion of the extent to which individuals’ motives are altruistic, particularly since the term used for helping behavior early in the OCB literature was altruism ( Organ, 1988 ; Smith et al., 1983 ). The problem, as noted by Organ (1997) , was that the label for the behavior implied the motive behind the behavior. Furthermore, it may be more realistic to treat altruism as a continuum or to recognize that altruistic motive and egoistic motives can occur simultaneously, rather than to treat altruistic motives and egoistic motives as mutually exclusive ( Krebs, 1991 ). Moving beyond the altruism issue, this section focuses on other motives that are commonly discussed or studied in the helping literature for why people tend to be helpful or not.

Perhaps the most cited motive behind the performance of helping (and OCB in general) is an exchange motivation, typically discussed in terms of social exchange ( Organ, 1988 ; Organ et al., 2006 ). The nature of social exchange is that each party acts in the other’s best interests over time in a trust-based relationship ( Blau, 1964 ). Accordingly, employees will go above and beyond the call of duty to benefit the organization, their leader, or their coworkers when they feel as though those parties would do the same in return. There is evidence to suggest that the resulting OCB is target-specific, such that individuals reciprocate positive treatment from coworkers by performing helping behaviors targeted toward coworkers, with a similar pattern for leaders ( Kamdar & Van Dyne, 2007 ; Lavelle, Rupp, & Brockner, 2007 ). An exchange motivation may not apply for all workers; Lester, Meglino, and Korsgaard (2008) found that job satisfaction was related to OCB only for those low in other orientation, a finding they attributed to individuals high in other orientation being less exchange oriented.

In one of the first studies to explicitly attempt to measure the motives for performing OCB, Rioux and Penner (2001) identified three categories of motives: prosocial values (motivated by helping and forming positive relationships), organizational concern (motivated by pride and loyalty toward the organization), and impression management (motivated by being viewed positively by others). In general, helping behavior was more strongly predicted by prosocial values than organizational concern, and both were more strongly related to helping than impression management (which was not related to any of the OCB dimensions). Subsequent research has clarified that impression management motives may play more of a role as a moderator by strengthening the positive relationship between prosocial motives and helping ( Grant & Mayer, 2009 ) or for specific subgroups of employees (e.g., those with lower status, Bowler & Brass, 2006 , or those who are extraverted, Chiaburu, Stoverink, Li, & Zhang, 2015 ).

In a recent qualitative study focused on task-related helping behavior at work, Taber and Deosthali (2014) identified five categories of motives. The first was “helping others contributes to the team or organization,” which included ideas of felt responsibility to the team or organization as well as specific ideas of complying with helping norms in the organization and the intertwined success of the individual with the success of their coworkers. The second category was “helping others is a personal value,” which captured the idea that individuals help because it is part of their trait makeup and doing so satisfies their basic needs or motives. The third category, “helping others is contingent,” involved the idea that helping behavior would be performed so long as certain conditions were met, such as if the help provider had relevant knowledge, if it would not harm the help provider’s job performance, or if characteristics of the help seeker or the help request met certain standards. The fourth category, “helping others has an expectation or reciprocity,” was focused on receiving benefits to oneself in the future in exchange for helping, whether that was narrowly targeted toward the person to be helped or more generally from others as part of a broad “just world hypothesis.” The final category was “helping others is a job responsibility,” which aligned with the literature on role definitions (e.g., Morrison, 1994 ) that has found that people are more likely to help when they view helping as part of their job.

Other literatures provide additional insights about what may motivate helping behavior. For instance, in the volunteering literature, Clary and colleagues (1998) identified six motives for volunteering: values (opportunity to express altruistic or humanitarian values), understanding (learning and self-development), social (relationships with others), career (career preparation or career-relevant skills), protective (guilt reduction for being more fortunate), and enhancement (improving one’s self-esteem). In the social psychology literature, Weinstein and Ryan (2010) applied self-determination theory ( Deci & Ryan, 2000 ) to the study of prosocial behavior to discuss how individuals may help others out of their own personal choice in line with their values and interests (autonomous motivation) versus out of pressure from others or other externally-imposed reasons (controlled motivation). This distinction maps onto Cain et al.’s (2014) categories of “giving” and “giving in” discussed in the previous section. Also from the social psychology literature comes the idea of competitive altruism, in which individuals act altruistically (i.e., help others) to gain a reputation for being generous and putting the group first, which enhances their status within the group ( Hardy & Van Vugt, 2006 ). Finally, the literature on intergroup relations suggests that the motivation for helping may depend on who is being helped, such as whether it is the in-group or the out-group ( Lorenz, Warner, & VanDeursen, 2015 ; Nadler, Harpaz-Gorodeisky, & Ben-David, 2009 ; Stürmer, Snyder, Kropp, & Siem, 2006 ).

Who Gives Help?

The question of who is more likely to perform OCB is likely the most researched question in the OCB literature. Because reviews of individual differences and attitudes as predictors of OCB are readily available (e.g., Organ et al., 2006 ; Organ & Ryan, 1995 ; Podsakoff et al., 2000 ; Spitzmuller, Van Dyne, & Ilies, 2009 ), this section will provide a relatively brief overview of the research findings with a specific focus on the results for helping behavior. Note that this discussion is closely tied to the previous section on motives for performing helping behavior, as the presence of each antecedent typically can be explained in terms of one of the underlying motives discussed earlier.

With regard to individual difference predictors of helping or OCB in general, one of the most consistent predictors has been the Big Five dimension of agreeableness ( Podsakoff et al., 2000 ; Organ & Ryan, 1995 ), even after accounting for job satisfaction ( Ilies, Fulmer, Spitzmuller, & Johnson, 2009 ). As noted by Organ et al. (2006) , individuals high in agreeableness may be more likely to help because of their prosocial tendencies and their desire to decrease the levels of discomfort experienced by their coworkers. Moreover, although individuals low in agreeableness vary in their OCB according to their transient mood, those high in agreeableness are more stable in their performance regardless of their mood ( Ilies, Scott, & Judge, 2006 ). These findings are in line with the social psychology literature, which has found that individuals high in agreeableness are more likely to help across situations, group memberships, and levels of costs associated with helping ( Graziano, Habashi, Sheese, & Tobin, 2007 ). Several individual differences closely related to agreeableness have also been associated with helping behavior, including empathy ( McNeely & Meglino, 1994 ; Settoon & Mossholder, 2002 ) and perspective taking ( Kamdar, McAllister, & Turban, 2006 ). The social psychological literature on the empathy-altruism hypothesis is also relevant here, although that literature focuses on empathy in specific situations targeted at specific individuals, rather than dispositional differences (see review by Batson, Ahmad, & Lishner, 2009 ).

The other major category of predictors studied in research focusing on who is more likely to perform helping behavior or OCB more generally is employee attitudes. The role of attitudes has been a central question going back to the earliest empirical research on organizational citizenship, when a focus on OCB as a criterion was viewed as a way of understanding how job satisfaction may impact employee performance ( Bateman & Organ, 1983 ) and is closely tied to the social exchange motives discussed previously (i.e., when individuals are satisfied with their work and feel like they are treated fairly, they will perform OCB in exchange). Meta-analyses have confirmed the usefulness of attitudinal variables such as satisfaction, fairness, and commitment for predicting helping behavior ( Podsakoff et al., 2000 ) and that attitudes tend to be more strongly related to OCB than in-role performance ( Hoffman, Blair, Meriac, & Woehr, 2007 ; Organ & Ryan, 1995 ). One interesting direction in more recent research has been to investigate how individual difference predictors like personality work together with attitudinal variables to predict OCB. For instance, Ilies et al. (2009) showed that the effects of agreeableness on OCB-I were partially mediated by job satisfaction. In other words, the effect of agreeableness on helping is likely due in part to the tendency for agreeable people to be more helpful toward their coworkers, but also in part due to agreeable people being more satisfied in their jobs, and performing more helping behavior as a result. In another example, Lester et al. (2008) found that the relationship between satisfaction and OCB was moderated by other orientation, such that the relationship was more positive when other orientation was low. They explained these findings in terms of individuals high in other orientation being less likely to act out of rational, self-interested judgments associated with social exchange.

When Do People Help?

In contrast to the previous section that focused on characteristics of individuals as predictors of helping, this section focuses on various aspects of the context that contribute to the performance of helping behavior. Context is defined broadly to include all aspects of the work or work environment outside of the individual. Past reviews of the OCB literature have used such categories as task/job characteristics, leadership, group characteristics, organizational characteristics, and cultural context ( Organ et al., 2006 ), although this section will discuss relational characteristics to distinguish attributes of a relationship with another individual coworker from leadership or group characteristics. Because this literature is reviewed in depth elsewhere ( Organ et al., 2006 ; Podsakoff et al., 2000 ; Spitzmuller et al., 2009 ), this section will provide only brief highlights from each of these general categories based on these past reviews.

A number of task- or job-related characteristics have been shown to be related to employee helping behavior (or OCB-I). For instance, task feedback (the degree to which the task itself provides information on the employee’s performance), intrinsically satisfying tasks (the extent to which performance of the task provides satisfaction independent of extrinsic rewards), and task interdependence (the extent to which the task requires interaction, information, or other resources from a coworker) have been shown to be positively related to helping ( Pearce & Gregersen, 1991 ; Podsakoff et al., 2000 ). In contrast, task routinization (the degree to which tasks are routine or repetitive) and job/task demands (i.e., role overload) have been shown to be negatively related to helping ( Jex & Thomas, 2003 ; Podsakoff et al., 2000 ). In addition, combinations of various positive task characteristics, labeled as “task scope,” have been shown to be positively related to levels of helping behavior ( Farh, Podsakoff, & Organ, 1990 ). There is evidence that job attitudes such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment or a covenantal relationship with the organization at least partially mediate the relationship between task/job characteristics and helping behavior ( Cardona, Lawrence, & Bentler, 2004 ; Organ et al., 2006 ; Van Dyne, Graham, & Dienesch, 1994 ).

Leadership has been heavily studied as a predictor of helping behavior. The meta-analysis by Podsakoff et al. (2000) showed that a variety of behaviors associated with transformational leadership, including articulating a vision, providing an appropriate role model, fostering acceptance of group goals, high performance expectations, and intellectual stimulation, were all positively related to helping behavior. Moreover, transactional behavior such as providing rewards or punishments were shown to be related to helping (positively and negatively, respectively). In addition, they showed that leader supportive behaviors and the task-related behavior of role clarification were positively related to helping, whereas the task behavior of specification of procedures was negatively related to helping. Finally, they and Ilies, Nahrgang, and Morgeson (2007) showed strong effects for the quality of the leader-member exchange (or LMX) as a predictor of helping behavior. Ilies et al. (2007) also showed that LMX was a stronger predictor of helping behavior than it was of organizationally-directed citizenship behaviors (i.e., OCB-O), in line with the literature on social exchange and helping cited previously. A number of other leader-related variables have also been shown to be related to helping behavior, including ethical leadership ( Mayer, Kuenzi, Greenbaum, Bardes, & Salvador, 2009 ), servant leadership ( Ehrhart, 2004 ), and authentic leadership ( Hirst, Walumbwa, Aryee, Butarbutar, & Chen, in press) , along with negative leader behavior like abusive supervision ( Zellars, Tepper, & Duffy, 2002 ).

In addition to the relationship with one’s supervisor, relationships with coworkers have also been shown to be related to helping behavior. For instance, Anderson and Williams (1996) showed that the quality of the working relationship with a coworker was related to increased levels of helping behavior from that coworker (in addition to being related to decreased perceptions of the costs of seeking help from that individual). Other relationship variables, such as similarity ( Van der Vegt & Van De Vliert, 2005 ) and friendship ( Bowler & Brass, 2006 ), have also been shown to predict helping behavior. The topic of coworker relationships is particularly relevant for the application of social network approaches to helping. For example, Venkataramani and Dalal (2007) found that helping was predicted by the strength of the positive affective relationship between two parties, the existence of common-third party affective relationships (both positive and negative), and the help recipient’s centrality in both the positive and negative affective relationship network.

Moving beyond characteristics of individual relationships with other coworkers, characteristics of the group have also been shown to be related to helping behavior. For instance, group cohesiveness (the extent to which members are attracted to their group and want to remain part of it) is related to increased levels of helping behavior ( Ng & Van Dyne, 2005 ), as is team-member exchange (TMX, the quality of the relationships among team members; Kamdar & Van Dyne, 2007 ). In contrast, increased levels of conflict in the group are associated with decreased helping ( Ng & Van Dyne, 2005 ). Another factor that can decrease helping in groups is the presence of a “bad apple”; Raver, Ehrhart, and Chadwick (2012) found that groups with at least one member low in agreeableness tended to have lower mean helping behaviors. The group characteristics perhaps most directly related to helping is the group norm for helping behavior ( Ehrhart & Naumann, 2004 ); in fact, one of the motives identified by Taber and Deosthali (2014) for why individuals perform helping behavior was because it was part of the expectations for group members. Along these lines, Ng and Van Dyne (2005) showed that cooperative group norms were related to individual helping behavior, although Naumann and Ehrhart (2011) found that similar relationships between group helping norms and individual helping were present only when group members were highly attracted to the group or when ambiguity was low.

Characteristics of the organization as a whole can also play a role in the extent to which individuals help their coworkers. For instance, the extent to which the individual perceives that they supported by the organization (perceived organizational support, or POS) is related to helping behavior, although it is more strongly related to OCB directed toward the organization as a whole than OCB directed toward individuals ( Rhoades & Eisenberger, 2002 ), in line with exchange-based theories. Although Podsakoff et al. (2000) did not find that organizational formalization or organizational inflexibility were significantly related to helping in their meta-analysis, they did find that rewards outside of the leader’s control were negatively related to helping. Perhaps clarifying these findings, Bamberger and Levi (2009) found that helping was significantly lower under equity-oriented group-based pay structures versus equality-oriented pay structures or mixed structures. Thus, the nature of reward systems in the organization appears to play a role in encouraging (or discouraging) helping (see Mossholder, Richardson, & Settoon, for more on how HR systems might predict helping). Finally, Organ et al. (2006) highlighted organizational constraints (or barriers to effective job performance) as a factor in the performance of helping. Jex, Adams, Bachrach, and Sorenson (2003) found that organizational constraints were negatively related to helping for workers low in affective organizational commitment, but actually positively related to helping for those high in commitment, perhaps because such constraints give highly committed employees more opportunities to help each other out.

A final contextual antecedent to helping behavior is national culture. Over the past two decades, the study of OCB across cultures has increased markedly, in line with the broader global expansion of organizational behavior research ( Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, 2007 ; Tsui, Nifadkar, & Ou, 2007 ). Two early and particularly influential articles studying OCB across cultures were by Farh, Earley, and Lin (1997) and Lam, Hui, and Law (1999) . Specifically with regard to helping, both studies found support for helping as a dimension of OCB across cultures, and Lam et al. (1999) found that the extent to which helping was considered in-role was similar in Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, and the United States. In addition, Farh et al. (1997) found evidence that the relationship between justice and helping varied across cultures, particularly with regard to traditionality. In follow-up research examining the dimensionality of OCB in China, Farh, Zhong, and Organ (2004) also found evidence for helping as an OCB dimension, although they noted that Chinese employees may have a broader conceptualization of helping to include both work-related and non-work-related helping. Other examples of organizational research with specific implications for the cross-cultural understanding of helping include Perlow and Weeks’s (2002) research on differences in the framing of helping between engineers in the United States and India; Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, and Topolnytsky’s (2002) meta-analyis showing that affective and normative commitment were more strongly related to helping in studies outside of North America; Bachrach, Wang, Bendoly, and Zhang’s (2007) research on cross-cultural differences between the United States and China in the importance of OCBs (including helping) in performance evaluations; and Choi’s (2009) research on the predictors of group-level helping in a Korean sample. Also relevant is research on cross-cultural differences in prosocial behavior, such as Luria, Cnaan, and Boehm (2015) .

Why Do People Seek Help or Not Seek Help?

In contrast to the previous sections that focused primarily on the help provider’s perspective, in what follows the focus will be on individuals who ask for or seek help. In Figure 26.1 , these questions are covered under the decision to seek help or not and the request for help. As noted previously, most incidents of helping are the direct result of a request for help ( Burke et al., 1976 ; Kaplan & Cowen, 1981 ; Nadler, 1991 ). The literature on help seeking addresses a variety of topics, such as who asks for help, when do individuals ask for help, and who is asked for help. Much of that literature is founded on a core idea regarding why people seek help or not: the relative ratio of the costs and benefits of seeking help.

There are a number of benefits to seeking help from another individual. Many of these can be placed into three general categories: task accomplishment, task-related learning, and building relationships ( Chan, 2013 ; Lee, 1997 , 2002 ). When an individual seeks help, it is typically to solve a problem or to complete a task, and thus moving past that hurdle is the primary goal for the help being sought. However, there are other benefits as well. By observing the help provider or by receiving knowledge on how to complete the task, the help recipient can learn how to solve such issues on his or her own in the future (Lee, 1997 , 2002 ; Nebus, 2006 ). In addition, seeking help can strengthen the relationship between the help provider and help recipient, resulting in stronger informal network ties (Lee, 1997 , 2002 ), which can have important implications for individual and group performance ( Balkundi & Harrison, 2006 ; Cross & Cummings, 2004 ; Wong, 2008 ). Finally, seeking help from others can have the added benefits of reducing uncertainty for the help seeker as well as saving face ( Hofmann, Lei, & Grant, 2009 ).

At the same time, there are a number of costs to seeking help. As noted by Nebus (2006) , although there could be monetary costs associated with seeking help, the opportunity costs related to the time required for help seeking are likely more salient and influential (see also Fritzsche et al., 2000 ). The literature on help seeking has mostly focused on its social costs. Lee ( 1997 , 2002 ) proposed three social costs to help seeking: (1) the admission of incompetence (the help seeker is acknowledging that he or she does not have the skills or ability to solve the problem on his or her own); (2) the acknowledgment of inferiority (the help seeker is acknowledging that the help-seeking target is superior to himself or herself in some way); and (3) the acknowledgment of dependence on the help-seeking target (the help seeker is not independent; he or she requires the help of someone else to solve the problem or accomplish the task). In addition, Lee ( 1997 , 2002 ) highlighted how these three social costs have important implications for the help seeker’s self-esteem and public image (see also Fisher, Nadler, & Whitcher-Alagna, 1982 ; Gross & McMullen, 1983 ). Similar repercussions have been identified in the feedback-seeking literature, described in terms of damage to the ego and to the public image ( Ashford et al., 2003 ; Morrison, 2002 ). Other authors have identified additional possible ways to categorize costs for seeking help. For instance, Lim, Teo, and Zhao (2013) distinguished between intrapersonal costs associated with failing to meet your own aspirations and interpersonal costs associated with failing to meet others’ expectations. Nebus (2006) discussed three categories related to seeking advice: (1) social costs, such as the expectation of returning the favor; (2) psychological costs, such as feeling embarrassed for asking for help; and (3) institutional costs, such as possibly violating organizational norms based on the act of asking for help or on who is asked for help. The psychological costs discussed by Nebus (2006) overlap with the work of Lee ( 1997 , 2002 ) and the implications for help seeking for one’s self-esteem. The idea of social costs of feeling indebted to the help provider raises the issue of reciprocation, which will be addressed later in this chapter. In addition, the role of norms is a central concept for how helping can become embedded as typical behavior in work units, which is discussed elsewhere in this chapter as an antecedent to helping behavior and an avenue to explain helping behavior’s relationship with unit and organizational effectiveness.

As individuals decide whether to seek help, they weigh the potential benefits against the potential costs ( Chan, 2013 ; Hofmann et al., 2009 ; Nadler, 1991 ). The literature on feedback seeking has emphasized a similar cost-benefit analysis (e.g., Anseel et al., 2015 ; Ashford et al., 2003 ; VandeWalle & Cummings, 1997 ). In the social networking literature, this idea was formalized in Nebus’s (2006) advice network generation theory. In that model, the interaction between the perceived value of approaching a possible help provider and the value the help seeker would expect to gain from that individual is balanced against the interaction between the perceived costs of approaching a possible help provider and his or her perceived accessibility. Thus, across a number of literatures, the balance between the benefits and costs is central for understanding the decision to seek or not seek help, as well as for understanding who asks for help, when individuals ask for help, and who is asked for help, which are discussed in the next sections.

Who Asks for Help?

The personal predictors of help-seeking behavior have received extensive attention, especially in the social psychology (e.g., Nadler & Halabi, 2015 ) and clinical psychology (e.g., Wills & DePaulo, 1991 ) literatures. Although an extensive review of that literature is beyond the scope of this chapter, three of the most commonly studied help seeker attributes will be highlighted here (self-esteem, gender, and achievement goal orientation), along with a brief overview of the various other characteristics that have been studied. Building from the previous section, the common thread throughout much of this literature is the role that these characteristics play in the perception of the costs and benefits of help seeking.

Perhaps the most commonly discussed characteristic of help seekers described in the literature is self-esteem, in line with the ego-related costs of help seeking discussed previously. The findings in this area have been mixed. There is evidence showing that individuals high in self-esteem are less likely to seek help (e.g., Nadler, 1986 ; Tessler & Schwartz, 1972 ; Wills & DePaulo, 1991 ), particularly under conditions when the ego is threatened ( Nadler, 1987 ). The explanation for these findings is that the costs of seeking help, particularly with regard to concerns about inferiority, are higher for those with high self-esteem, in addition to the tendency for individuals high in self-esteem to avoid the social costs involved with being indebted to others ( Chan, 2013 ; Nadler, Mayseless, Peri, & Chemerinski, 1985 ). In contrast to the idea that high self-esteem is associated with less help seeking, there is also research to suggest that individuals higher in self-esteem seek more help ( Nadler, 1983 ). Such findings have come from research on students seeking help for academic performance ( Karabenick & Knapp, 1991 ) as well as in organizational research on feedback-seeking behavior ( Ashford, 1986 ). The explanation for this finding is that individuals low in self-esteem will perceive higher costs for help seeking because admitting incompetence will damage their already fragile ego ( Chan, 2013 ). Adding to this mix of findings, other research has not found support for a relationship between self-esteem and help/feedback seeking ( Anseel et al., 2015 ; Cleavenger, Gardner, & Mhatre, 2007 ). Chan (2013) explained these disparate findings by suggesting that the relationship between self-esteem and help seeking is curvilinear, such that the different costs of help seeking at both very low and very low levels of self-esteem tend to reduce the frequency of such behaviors. However, at intermediate levels, those costs are minimized (see also Butler & Neuman, 1995 ).

Gender is another characteristic that has received some attention in the literature on help seeking. In general, women show a stronger willingness to seek help than men across a variety of situations ( Nadler & Halabi, 2015 ), including in managerial ( Rosener, 1990 ) or entrepreneurial roles ( Studdard & Munchus, 2009 ), or when experiencing health or mental health problems ( Galdas, Cheater, & Marshall, 2005 ). Explanations for these differences are typically tied to gender roles ( Nadler, 1991 ). Gender roles for women are associated with more communal characteristics, such as being nurturing, kind, and interpersonally sensitive, whereas the characteristics for men are more agentic, including being aggressive, dominant, and independent ( Eagly, 1987 ; Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000 ). Differences in gender roles are linked to differences in perceptions of the costs of help seeking. Specifically, being viewed as incompetent, inferior, and/or dependent is more contrary to the male role than the female role. Thus, the costs of help seeking are typically going to be viewed as higher for men than for women ( Lee, 1997 ). Some research suggests that these findings extend to the gender stereotype of the occupation ( Lee, 2002 ) and may vary depending on the individual’s identification with the gender role ( Nadler, Maler, & Friedman, 1984 ) or the nature of the problem ( Wills & DePaulo, 1991 ). In addition, the context may affect the role of gender in help seeking. For instance, Lee (1997) found that men were more likely to seek help when there were collectivistic norms as opposed to individualistic norms. This research highlights the interplay between personal and contextual characteristics in guiding perceptions of the costs of help seeking.

The final example of the characteristics of help seekers highlighted here is achievement goal orientation. Nadler (1991) discussed the tension for instrumentally motivated individuals between wanting to ask for help to make progress toward goal achievement and not wanting to ask for help to avoid being perceived as incompetent. How this tension is handled and its implications for the perception of costs of help seeking are strongly influenced by the goal orientation of the individual. Individuals with a learning or mastery orientation are focused on developing competence, learning new skills, and task mastery ( Elliot & Church, 1997 ; VandeWalle & Cummings, 1997 ). In contrast, individuals with a performance orientation can be distinguished in terms of the motivation to gain favorable assessments of their competence from others (performance-approach) versus the motivation to avoid unfavorable assessments of competence from others (performance-avoid; Elliot & Church, 1997 ). These goal orientations have significant implications for perceptions of the costs and benefits of help seeking. Specifically, individuals with a learning orientation will tend to focus on the benefits of help seeking in terms of learning new materials and gaining mastery, whereas the costs of help seeking in terms of being viewed as incompetent or inferior will be particularly salient to individuals with a performance orientation ( Chan, 2013 ; VandeWalle & Cummings, 1997 ). In addition, the costs for individuals high in performance orientation will be even more salient when the individual’s performance is more visible, such that the impact on the individual’s public image is heightened ( Chan, 2013 ; Williams & Williams, 1983 ). Research evidence on the role of goal orientation has supported this general pattern, both in terms of help seeking (e.g., Butler, 2007 ; Komissarouk & Nadler, 2014 ; Newman, 1998 ) and feedback seeking ( Anseel et al, 2015 ; VandeWalle & Cummings, 1997 ), including the specific role of perceived benefits and costs as a mediator of the relationship between goal orientation and help/feedback seeking ( VandeWalle & Cummings, 1997 ). In addition, research suggests that goal orientation is not only related to levels of help seeking, but the type of help that is sought, such that mastery orientation predicts preference for autonomous help and work avoidance predicts expedient help ( Butler, 2007 ; see also related research on promotion versus prevention focus by Komissarouk & Nadler, 2014 ).

Although these three characteristics have been highlighted here, there are a number of other characteristics that have been addressed in the literature. For instance, older individuals will generally be less likely to seek help because maintaining independence becomes more central to the ego with age ( Nadler, 1991 ). In fact, in the feedback-seeking literature, age, organizational tenure, and job tenure have all been negatively associated with feedback-seeking behavior ( Anseel et al., 2015 ). The social costs of seeking help will also be more salient to shy individuals, and self-conscious individuals will seek to avoid the negative evaluations associated with help seeking ( Nadler, 1991 ). When individuals are more anxious, they are more likely to seek advice, but they also have trouble recognizing the quality of the advice or potential conflicts of interest ( Gino, Brooks, & Schweitzer, 2012 ). Individuals high in self-monitoring will avoid help seeking due to the status-related costs ( Flynn, Reagans, Amanatullah, & Ames, 2006 ). Individual high in social competence are more willing to seek help ( Chan, 2013 ; Ryan & Pintrich, 1998 ), likely because the perceived psychological costs of feeling embarrassed by asking for help ( Nebus, 2006 ) are lower for these individuals. Individuals high in need for power will be less likely to seek help in order to avoid the social cost of being indebted to the other person ( Chan, 2013 ). Finally, help seeking is more likely for those higher in attachment anxiety and less likely for those higher in attachment avoidance ( Wu, Parker, & De Jong, 2013 ), as well as more likely for those with a dependent personality ( Nadler & Halabi, 2015 ; Sroufe, Fox, & Pancake, 1983 ).

When Do People Ask for Help?

Beyond the personal characteristics that influence whether an individual seeks help, there are also a number of contextual variables that play a role. Note that this section does not address the target of the helping requests (i.e., who is asked for help); that issue is addressed in the next section. The two primary categories of contextual characteristics that have been found in the literature are task characteristics and work group/organizational characteristics.

One of the first studies to focus on task characteristics in the help-seeking literature was by Nadler (1987) . He studied the ego centrality of the task, which was experimentally manipulated by telling participants that the task was (or was not) associated with intelligence. He found when the task was ego central, help-seeking levels were lower, which he explained in terms of the costs of seeking help related to being viewed as inferior to others. Similarly, Lee (2002) found that help seeking was less likely when tasks were more central to the organization’s core competence. Again, the explanation for this finding was in terms of the increased costs associated with being viewed as incompetent and inferior on such core tasks. Another issue related to tasks is the extent of the task demands or the severity of the problems one is having. Bamberger (2009) suggested that the evidence for instrumental help is in line with a curvilinear relationship, such that increased need is associated with increased help seeking up to a point, and then concerns of being viewed as incompetent begin to outweigh the benefits of seeking help (similar to the relationship with self-esteem described previously). Such a curvilinear relationship helps to explain the unexpectedly positive relationship between task demands and perceived costs of help seeking found by Anderson and Williams (1996) . Finally, the extent to which the task requires interdependence among workers has been shown to play a role in help seeking. For instance, Anderson and Williams (1996) found that task interdependence has a direct positive relationship with help-seeking behavior. In such cases, the instrumental benefits of help seeking will be higher, overcoming any possible costs.

Other contextual variables found to predict help seeking would best be characterized as group or organizational characteristics. The most well-developed literature on the work environment is captured by research on organizational climate and culture ( Ehrhart, Schneider, & Macey, 2014 ), and such variables play a critical role in help-seeking behavior. One key layer of culture is the behavioral norms in the organization ( Rousseau, 1990 ). Help-seeking behaviors will be more likely to occur when such behaviors are viewed as typical and expected in the organization or work group ( Ashford et al., 2003 ; Ashford & Northcraft, 1992 ; Bamberger, 2009 ), as the costs of seeking help are lowered in such environments. Similarly, the extent to which the organizational culture is characterized by individualistic or collectivistic norms can impact help seeking ( Lee, 1997 ), as the costs of being viewed as dependent on others will be higher when the norms are more individualistic ( Chan, 2013 ). With regard to climate, Bamberger’s (2009) model of work-based help seeking highlights the relevance of the general supportive climate in the organization for help seeking, as well as very specific climates like a privacy regulation climate and a peer intervention climate, which are particularly relevant when workers are seeking help for personal issues they may be dealing with (e.g., substance abuse treatment; Bennett & Lehman, 2001 ). Related to issues of climate is the role of the organization’s policies and procedures in encouraging or preventing help seeking ( Chan, 2013 ). Given that common definitions and models of climate incorporate the role of policies and procedures ( Ehrhart et al., 2014 ; Ostroff, Kinicki, & Muhammad, 2012 ), a focus on their impact on help seeking would be useful.

A variety of other group or organizational characteristics have been considered in the help-seeking literature. For instance, building on the work on achievement goal orientation discussed in the previous section, researchers have also highlighted how the context can be task involving, in which learning goals are activated, or ego involving, in which performance goals are activated ( Chan, 2013 ; Newman, 1998 ; Nicholls, 1984 ). As noted by Chan (2013) , an ego-involving context makes it more likely that workers will view help seeking as indicative of incompetence, decreasing the likelihood of such behaviors, whereas a task-involving context will focus attention on instrumental goals and the benefits of help seeking. Leadership is another contextual factor in help seeking; as indicated in Ashford et al.’s (2003) review of the feedback-seeking literature, task-oriented behaviors can highlight the benefits of the help/feedback received ( VandeWalle, Ganesan, Challagalla, & Brown, 2000 ) and relationship-oriented behaviors can decrease the perception of some of the costs associated with help/feedback seeking (e.g., image costs; Madzar, 1995 ). The role of the leaders may be particularly important given their critical role in establishing the norms and climate in their work units ( Ehrhart & Naumann, 2004 ; Ehrhart et al., 2014 ). The level of uncertainty or ambiguity in the environment could also play a role in help seeking. There is evidence from the feedback-seeking literature the level of uncertainty or change in the environment heightens the instrumental motive for feedback ( Ashford, 1988 ; Ashford & Cummings, 1985 ), but meta-analytic evidence has not supported this relationship ( Anseel et al., 2015 ). Anseel et al. (2015) noted that the lack of results could be due to the reciprocal relationship between feedback seeking and uncertainty, such that uncertainty increases feedback seeking but feedback seeking then reduces uncertainty. Other group or organizational characteristics that have been addressed in the help-seeking literature include national culture (including how cultural diversity could increase the need for help seeking but also create additional costs related to communication differences; Ashford et al., 2003 ), occupational role (particularly how the gender stereotype of the job can highlight typical gender norms, as discussed previously; Lee, 2002 ), and the presence of others in the context (such that higher visibility could heighten the social costs of help seeking, although the presence of others with similar problems could decrease those threats; Bamberger, 2009 ).

Who Is Asked for Help?

A critical question in the help-seeking literature is who is targeted for help requests, and one of the most studied characteristics of individuals who are targets of help seeking is ability or expertise. In general, individuals with higher levels of ability or expertise are more likely to be asked for help ( Chan, 2013 ; Hofmann et al., 2009 ; Morrison & Vancouver, 2000 ; Nadler et al., 2003 ; Nebus, 2006 ; Vancouver & Morrison, 1995 ). These findings are in line with the idea that such individuals are going to maximize the benefits of help seeking, whether it be in terms of task accomplishment, task-related learning, or building relationships (i.e., networking). The problem is that the costs of asking for help are typically higher for such individuals as well, particularly since higher expertise is commonly associated with higher levels of status and thus increased concerns about the impact of one’s image. The result of such complexity is that the relationship between ability/expertise and help seeking is nuanced and dependent on a variety of other relational and contextual variables. For example, Hofmann et al. (2009) found a three-way interaction between target expertise, trust, and accessibility predicting the likelihood of seeking help from the target. Specifically, they found that when the target is low in expertise, accessibility and trust are positively associated with more help seeking, such that the highest levels of help seeking result when both accessibility and trust are high. In this case, the benefits of help seeking are lower, but the costs are also lower with increasing accessibility and trust. When expertise is high, then trust or accessibility needs to be high for help seeking to occur, although both are not necessary. However, help seeking is least likely to occur when the target is neither accessible nor trustworthy. In this case, even though the benefits of seeking help are higher, at least some of the costs of help seeking need to be mitigated through higher accessibility or trust in order for help-seeking levels to be maximized.

Closely related to the role of expertise in help seeking is the relationship between social proximity or status and help seeking. Multiple authors have highlighted the inconsistency in the research findings in this area ( Bamberger, 2009 ; Nadler, 1991 ; Nadler & Halabi, 2015 ). In some research, individuals have been shown to seek more help from individuals of equal status rather than unequal status (e.g., Lee, 1997 , 2002 ). The thinking guiding this research is that the costs of seeking help from individuals of equal status will be lower than seeking help from those of higher or lower status. In other research, the potential helper’s similarity to the recipient is negatively associated with help seeking (e.g., Nadler, 1987 ; Nadler & Fisher, 1986 ; Nadler, Fisher, & Streufert, 1976 ). The thinking behind this research is that when similarity is high, asking help from that individual represents a larger threat to the help seeker because he or she would have to acknowledge his or her inferiority to a comparable other (i.e., comparison stress is higher; Nadler & Fisher, 1986 ). Several explanations for these differences in findings have been suggested. One is the nature of the other individual in terms of the level of intimacy shared, such that help seeking is more likely to be high with an equal-status target with whom the help seeker shares an intimate relationship because the target will be less likely to be a comparison other for the help seeker and is less of a threat in terms of evaluating the help seeker as incompetent or inferior ( Bamberger, 2009 ; Nadler, 1991 ). Another explanation is the extent to which the context is evaluative or competitive ( Nadler & Halabi, 2015 ), such that a nonevaluative context has lower costs associated with being viewed as dependent or inferior to the help giver. Finally, the type of help may play a role. Nadler (1991) described a two-stage process in which it is initially useful to have an individual high in social proximity for gathering information about the problem and thinking about possible solutions, but once the problem is well defined, the costs of being dependent on a close other increase.

Although the literature on the targets of help seeking has been dominated by issues of expertise and social proximity, other characteristics have also been addressed. These include having high task interdependence with the target of the help-seeking request ( Anderson & Williams, 1996 ), the lack of other options for seeking help or feedback ( Walsh, Ashford, & Hill, 1985 ), the quality of the relationship with the target of help/feedback seeking ( Anseel et al., 2015 ), and future opportunities to reciprocate the help ( Greenberg & Shapiro, 1971 ). From a group relations perspective, individuals are more likely to help members of their in-group ( Flippen, Hornstein, Siegal, & Weitzman, 1996 ; Levine, Prosser, Evans, & Reicher, 2005 ), although they may go to the out-group for help when doing so will disconfirm a negative stereotype of their own group ( Wakefield, Hopkins, & Greenwood, 2014 ). Erdogan, Bauer, and Taylor (2015) highlighted how work group members with a high-quality relationship with the supervisor (i.e., high leader-member exchange, or LMX) offer potential benefits for help seeking because they are more likely to have access to resources but also additional costs because their close relationship with the leader could increase the salience of the costs associated with image. Their research showed that employees high in LMX were more central in the group’s advice network when they had a low tendency to gossip and a strong tendency to help others.

One model that captures a number of these issues comes from Nebus’s (2006) advice network generation theory. This theory focuses on who individuals choose to contact when they are in need of task-related advice, which includes the cost-benefit analysis that underlies much of the help-seeking literature, as described previously. Nebus identified four general issues that contribute to whether an individual will contact a particular person for advice (from his Figure 4 on p, 624). The first is the perceived value of contacting the individual, which is influenced by the expertise of the potential help provider and the cognitive trust in that individual (i.e., the general perception that the target is competent and a high performer, independent of his or her expertise in a particular area). The second category is the expectation of obtaining value from that particular individual, or the expectation that the target will be willing to share knowledge with or provide help. This expectation is influenced by such factors as affective trust in the individual (i.e., sharing an emotional bond), an obligation of reciprocation (due to position or past help provided by the help seeker to the target), having mutual friends, the previous responsiveness of the individual, and the homophily of the help seeker and potential help giver (i.e., demographic similarity). The third category is the perceived cost of targeting that particular individual, which is influenced by monetary costs, time duration to receive a response, social costs, psychological costs, and institutional costs (as described previously). Finally, the fourth consideration is the perceived accessibility of the target and the risk of exceeding costs, which are determined by the target’s psychic distance (i.e., differences in language, culture, education, etc.), geographic distance, organizational separation (e.g., by level or division), and the frequency of contact with the individual.

Why Do People Help or Not Help in Response to a Specific Request?

Once there is a request for help, the potential helper must decide how to respond (the second major decision depicted in the framework in Figure 26.1 ). A variety of factors have been studied to understand how individuals respond when presented with an opportunity to help, and some of the issues here overlap with those discussed previously for what motivates people to be generally helpful. To distinguish this section from that one, the focus here will primarily be on those issues related to how individuals respond to a specific help request.

Much in the same way that help seekers weigh the benefits and costs of requesting help (as discussed previously), the targets of help-seeking requests similarly weigh the benefits and costs when responding to a help request. Although the social psychological literature on bystander intervention ( Fischer et al., 2011 ) typically focuses on emergency situations and does not necessarily address a helping request, per se, it does provide insights into the issues that potential help givers take into account when deciding whether to provide help or not. One model from this literature that specifically addresses the costs and rewards of helping is the arousal: cost-reward model ( Dovidio, Piliavin, Gaertner, Schroeder, & Clark, 1991 ; Piliavin, Dovidio, Gaertner, & Clark, 1981 ). This model proposes that seeing another person in need causes an unpleasant emotional arousal that the perceiver is motivated to reduce. This part of the model proposes that the “clarity, severity, and duration of need” and the potential helper’s “physical and psychological closeness to the person in need” ( Dovidio et al., 1991 , p. 90) are critical in determining the level of arousal and thus the potential helper’s likelihood of helping. At the same time, whether the potential helper acts to help is influenced by cost-reward analysis. Possible costs include effort, time required, or discomfort/danger ( Dovidio et al., 1991 ; Fritzsche et al., 2000 ), and possible rewards include praise, admiration, and effectively making a difference to the person in need ( Dovidio et al., 1991 ). This model also includes costs of not helping, which include personal costs of feeling bad or looking bad to others, as well as costs to the victim depending on the severity of the consequences if they do not receive help. As a result, one implication of the model is that when costs to the potential helper are high, they may reduce the arousal by reinterpreting the situation in a way that minimizes the costs of not helping (e.g., focusing on the responsibility of the person in need for the problem or whether others are in a better position to help).

Some literature on helping or help seeking is in line with the idea of the cost-benefit analysis. For instance, individuals may be more likely to respond favorably to a help request when it is relatively easy to do so ( Bartlett & DeSteno, 2007 ; Fritzsche et al., 2000 ) because the costs of providing “easy” help are relatively low. As another example, Van Der Vegt, Bunderson, and Oosterhof (2006) found that group members were more committed to and more likely to help those with high levels of expertise. Even though expert members may need help the least, the possibility that the expert would feel obligated to help in return in the future provides a clear benefit to the help giver. Finally, the extent to which the help is perceived to fall outside the help-seeking target’s role, the request is perceived to be urgent, and the relative resources between the help seeker and target may increase the perception of the costs associated with providing help ( Flynn, 2006 ).

In addition to weighing the costs and benefits of helping, there are several other relevant issues that have been identified in the literature related to how individuals respond to help requests. The verbal strategies of the help seeker are relevant; for instance, Lee (1999) identified three general categories of such strategies that can be used in help seeking: other-enhancing strategies (elevating the target of the helping request or degrading oneself), minimizing strategies (attempting to reduce the imposition of the request), and task-orienting strategies (focusing on achievement of goal). She found that the use of more strategies was related to providing higher quality information and the help seeker being viewed as more likeable although not more competent. Another issue is the pressure on the target for help and how busy he or she is; Wallaert, Ward, and Mann (2014) found that when individuals are cognitively distracted, they are more likely to respond to pressure to help if those cues are more salient than cues to not help. Why the person is asking for help and his or her in-group versus out-group status are additional factors. Lorenz et al. (2015) showed that the help seeker’s stated goal and whether he or she was in the in-group or out-group influence responses to help requests such that the help provider gave more help to the in-group when the goals were power-oriented/instrumental (i.e., solving a specific problem to achieve tangible benefits) and more help to the out-group when the goals were value-oriented/ideological (i.e., supporting personal beliefs or principles). From the teams literature, backing-up behavior (a form of helping) is less likely to occur when the potential help provider does not see the need for help as legitimate ( Porter et al., 2003 ). Finally, in contrast to the previous research reviewed about experts being targets for help seeking, when nonexperts are asked for help, they may not be able to because they simply do not have the necessary skills or resources to do so ( Taber & Deosthali, 2014 ).

A very closely related question to whether people help or not when they have the opportunity or when they are asked is the question of what type of help they give when they do help. In recent research by Nadler and Chernyak-Hai (2014) , the status of the help seeker (high versus low) was related to differences in the attributions made about the causes of the need for help (unstable and external for high status individuals versus stable and internal for low status individuals). As a result, high-status individuals were given autonomy-oriented help and low-status individuals were given dependency-oriented help, which can be seen as further reinforcing the current status of both groups. Such research provides an excellent example of the insights that can be gained by differentiating among specific types of help that are given.

Who Reciprocates Help and Why?

The issue of reciprocation is closely tied to the more general idea of helping, as any act of helping raises the question of whether it will be reciprocated. Indeed, the decision to help someone or not can be affected by the help giver’s assessment of the likelihood or value of the reciprocation ( Van der Vegt et al., 2006 ). In Figure 26.1 , reciprocation is included as a possible outcome of the help given, and this section provides an overview of issues addressed in the literature on reciprocation (including the literature on favor reciprocation), covering such topics as why people reciprocate or not, who is more likely to reciprocate, and what are the outcomes of reciprocating or not.

In general, when individuals receive help, they feel some sense of obligation to reciprocate, which could be based on obligation as part of social exchange ( Gouldner, 1960 ) or because the feelings of indebtedness they experience represent a tension that increases the motivation to reciprocate to remove or reduce the tension ( Greenberg, 1980 ; Greenberg & Shapiro, 1971 ; Greenberg & Westcott, 1983 ). In fact, the likelihood of an individual giving help is strongly impacted by whether that individual received help from the other individual in the past ( Gross & Latané, 1974 ). In addition, the more help that was given or the more costly or difficult it was for the help giver, the higher the indebtedness and the increased likelihood of reciprocation ( DePaulo, Brittingham, & Kaiser, 1983 ; Greenberg, 1980 ). Nevertheless, recent research has identified a number of factors that influence these reciprocation processes and the extent to which individuals reciprocate and, if so, how much.

One major factor that comes into play is the perception of the helping recipient of the help giver’s intentions or motives. Ames, Flynn, and Weber (2004) examined the effects of whether help was perceived to be given on the basis of affect (specifically, positive feelings toward the recipient), role (i.e., as part of the help giver’s formal duties and obligations in the organization), or cost-benefit calculation (i.e., based on the benefits for the help giver relative to the costs). In general, help recipients’ attitudes toward future reciprocation were more positive when the help received was perceived to be based on affect rather than due to role or cost-benefit analysis, although the relative negative reaction to cost-benefit analysis disappeared when the magnitude of the help given was large. More recently, Belmi and Pfeffer (2015) examined the role of the organizational context on perceptions of motives for helping and norms for reciprocity. Their results revealed that the obligation to reciprocate was lower in an organizational setting than a personal setting, which could be explained by individuals tending to be more calculative and more likely to base decisions of reciprocation on the help giver’s anticipated future usefulness in organizational settings. Across both of these studies, the results indicate that individuals will be more likely to reciprocate when they judge the help giver as acting out of personal character or sincerely held emotions toward the helping target rather than out of obligation or to gain future benefit.

Several other factors besides motives have been investigated in the literature that shed light on helping reciprocation processes. For instance, how the help is perceived seems to vary between the giver of the help and the receiver of the help ( Flynn, 2006 ), an effect that changes over time as help providers tend to increase in the perceptions of the value of the help, whereas help receivers tend to decrease in their perceptions of the help ( Flynn, 2003b) . This finding has clear implications for whether help is reciprocated and, if so, to what extent. Going beyond exchange-based explanations for reciprocation, researchers have shown that affective states ( Lyons & Scott, 2012 ), norms for politeness ( Flynn, 2006 ), and both state- and trait-based gratitude ( Bartlett & DeSteno, 2007 ; Emmons & McCullough, 2003 ; Grant & Gino, 2010 ) are related to reciprocation. Relatedly, Flynn and Brockner (2003) found that favor recipients’ commitment to their relationship with the favor provider was more influenced by the giver’s interactional justice when providing the favor than the benefit provided to the recipient. In other words, how the help was given was actually more important than the extent of the help itself. Other research has focused on individual attributes related to reciprocation. For instance, some individuals may be more sensitive to reciprocating in kind based on their exchange ideology ( Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986 ), reciprocity beliefs ( Eisenberger, Lynch, Aselage,& Rohdieck, 2004 ), or personal norm of reciprocity ( Perugini, Gallucci, Presaghi, & Ercolani, 2003 ). In contrast, other individuals are high in reciprocation wariness, such that they are concerned about being taken advantage of or exploited in social relationships ( Cotterell, Eisenberger, & Speicher, 1992 ; Eisenberger, Cotterell, & Marvel, 1987 ). Furthermore, characteristics such as other orientation ( Korsgaard, Meglino, Lester, & Jeong, 2010 ) or relative standing in the organization ( Buunk, Doosje, Jans, & Hopstaken, 1993 ) may also play a role in how reciprocation processes are perceived.

On a final note regarding reciprocation, a number of outcomes have been associated with levels or reciprocation or imbalances in reciprocation. The results are not straightforward. For instance, individuals tend to experience negative affect, stress, and other negative emotional states when reciprocity is not balanced ( Bowling et al., 2004 ; Nahum-Shani, Bamberger, & Bacharach, 2011 ), and this is particularly the case for those high in exchange orientation and low in communal orientation ( Buunk et al., 1993 ). In contrast, Mueller and Kamdar (2011) found that reciprocating help diminished performance in terms of creativity, which they attributed time and energy costs of giving help as well as a potential tendency to discount divergent information from a dependent or less competent other. The results from Flynn (2003a) introduce even more complexity to understanding the outcomes of reciprocation. He found that individuals who tended to give more favors than they received experienced status benefits, but that such an imbalanced exchange also had productivity costs. However, he also found that generous individuals may experience increased benefits in both status and productivity if the frequency of exchange is high. Thus, although research as a whole suggests that balanced exchanges have positive benefits, being indebted or generous may have differential outcomes depending on characteristics of the individuals and the situation involved.

What Are the Outcomes of Help-Seeking/Receiving Help?

This section and the next address the two major categories of outcomes associated with helping processes besides reciprocation: the outcomes for seeking/receiving help (this section) and for giving help (the next section). Some of the information covered previously is related to these two topics. For instance, the material on the benefits and costs of help seeking addresses similar issues, although that literature typically focuses on the perceptions of the benefits and costs and how those perceptions impact whether individuals seek help or not (rather than the actual outcomes of help seeking). In addition, the previous section on reciprocation essentially addresses one possible outcome of receiving help: providing help back to the help provider (e.g., Halbesleben & Wheeler, 2015 ). In this section, the focus will be on examples of research addressing actual (versus perceived) outcomes of receiving help beyond the reciprocation of help.

Several positive benefits of help seeking have been identified in the literature, including increased creativity ( Mueller & Kamdar, 2011 ), reduced errors ( Stone & O’Gorman, 1991 ), improved newcomer job performance ( Morrison, 1993 ), and higher peer-rated performance ( Wu et al., 2013 ). Although a recent meta-analysis did not find a relationship between feedback seeking and performance, it did find that feedback seeking was related to job satisfaction, relationship-building behavior, networking, and socialization behaviors ( Anseel et al., 2015 ). Receiving help is positively associated with job satisfaction, perceived coworker support, and trust, and negatively associated with turnover intentions ( Halbesleben & Wheeler, 2015 ; Regts & Molleman, 2013 ). Perceived support from a variety of sources (e.g., the organization, supervisor, coworkers) has been shown to have a number of positive benefits ( Ng & Sorensen, 2008 ; Riggle, Edmondson, & Hansen, 2009 ). Research on social networks also supports the positive implications for team performance when members seek advice from each other; several studies have found positive relationships between the density a team’s advice network and team performance ( Balkundi & Harrison, 2006 ; Wong, 2008 ; Zhang & Peterson, 2011 ).

Of course, the outcomes of help seeking and receiving help are not necessarily so clear cut, and a number of variables have been found that moderate the outcomes of help seeking or that result in negative outcomes. As previously described, the creative benefits of help seeking can be undercut by the amount of help given in reciprocation ( Mueller & Kamdar, 2011 ). The positive effects of receiving help on job satisfaction are weaker or nonsignificant for individuals low in communion striving or when task interdependence is low ( Regts & Molleman, 2013 ). Similarly, the benefits of feedback seeking on job performance are moderated by attachment anxiety, such that there is no relationship found for those low in attachment anxiety ( Wu et al., 2013 ). Geller and Bamberger (2012) found no overall main effect of help seeking on performance; however, there was a positive effect for those who were oriented toward seeking autonomous help and for those oriented against seeking dependent help. Dalal and Bonaccio (2010) found that recipients’ responses to different types of advice varied depending on such issues as the type of decision and the characteristics of the recipient (e.g., agreeableness and gender). Barnes and colleagues (2008) found that the receipt of backing-up behavior in a team-based task resulted in decreased task work in a subsequent task, but only when the dependency of the help recipient was highlighted by another person advocating for the need for help on the first task.

The response to received help may depend on whether it was offered by the helper or requested by the recipient, with some research showing that offered help had a more positive response than requested help ( Broll, Gross, & Piliavin, 1974 ). At the same time, when help is imposed by another person (i.e., given without a request), it is likely to result in a threat to the self-esteem on the help recipient ( Deelstra et al., 2003 ; Schneider, Major, Luhtanen, & Crocker, 1996 ), in line with findings that invisible support that occurs outside the recipient’s awareness has more positive effects than visible support ( Bolger & Amarel, 2007 ; Bolger et al., 2000 ). Support can also cause increased strain (e.g., physical symptoms, emotional exhaustion) when the support highlights stressful aspects of the work environment ( Beehr, Bowling, & Bennett, 2010 ). In contrast to the literature suggesting that individuals are viewed as less competent when they seek help (e.g., Lee, 1997 , 2002 ), Brooks, Gino, and Schweitzer (2015) showed that individuals can be perceived as more competent when seeking help when the task is difficult, when the perceiver is the target of the help request, and when an expert is the target of the help request. Finally, Nadler et al. (2003) found that help seeking had a curvilinear relationship with performance evaluations, such that very low levels (indicating habitual reluctance to ask for help) and very high levels (indicating habitual reliance on others) were both associated with lower performance relative to moderate levels of help seeking. They also found that the effects were moderated by the expertise of the help-seeking target, such that performance was rated higher when the target of the helping request was more knowledgeable.

One model that captures some of the complexity involved with the outcomes of seeking and receiving help is Fisher et al.’s (1982) threat-to-self-esteem model of recipient reactions to aid. At the core of their model is the idea that help received can be interpreted in one of two ways: as predominantly threatening or predominantly supportive. The interpretation then determines the response, with threatening interpretations leading to such outcomes as negative affect, negative evaluations of the help giver and the help, low reciprocity, low help seeking, high refusal of help to others, and high subsequent self-help. In contrast, supportive interpretations lead to more positive outcomes, such as positive affect, positive evaluations of the help giver and help, high reciprocity, high help seeking, low refusal of help to others, and low subsequent self-help. Furthermore, they describe the conditions that influence the interpretation of the help received, in alignment with the previous discussion of the costs and benefits of help seeking. For instance, the nature of the help given may highlight the support and concern of the help giver, or it may highlight the help recipient’s inferiority and dependency. In addition, the help should align with relevant societal values to avoid being viewed as threatening, such as maintaining the recipient’s independence and self-reliance in a US context, as well as being consistent with general principles of fairness. Finally, the extent to which the help is instrumental in meeting the recipient’s aids without creating dependency is more likely to be viewed as supportive as opposed to threatening. Although this model was not developed specifically for workplace settings, the general principles could easily be expanded to the study of the outcomes of help received in organizations.

What Are the Outcomes of Helping Others?

The outcomes of helping have been found to be generally positive across a number of literatures and levels of analysis. For instance, a meta-analysis by Podsakoff et al. (2009) found that OCB-I was positively related to overall job performance ratings, reward allocation decisions, reward recommendations, and actual rewards, and negatively related to absenteeism, turnover intentions, and actual turnover. Thus, individuals’ helping behavior appears to be valued by managers, and employees who help their coworkers are less likely to exhibit withdrawal behaviors. Extending this finding, Grant, Parker, and Collins (2009) found that self-rated anticipatory helping was positively related to supervisor performance evaluations, but only when either prosocial values were high or negative affect was low. In other words, supervisors are likely to value helping when they judge the intentions as being benevolent. Employees’ helping behaviors have also been shown to be related to improved mood at work, particularly for extraverts ( Glomb, Bhave, Miner, & Wall, 2011 ). The literature on volunteering (see review by Rodell, Breitsohl, Schröder, & Keating, 2016 ) suggests that it is associated with higher levels of need satisfaction in terms of providing both a sense of accomplishment and a sense of belonging, and it is also associated with higher levels of well-being ( Mojza, Sonnentag, & Bornemann, 2011 ). Perhaps most strikingly, volunteering has been shown to have a positive impact on mortality ( Brown, Nesse, Vinokur, & Smith, 2003 ; Moen, Dempster-McClain, & Williams, 1992 ; Oman, Thoresen, & McMahon, 1999 ). Research on prosocial behavior outside of the organizational context has also identified a number of positive outcomes for those who help. For instance, in the review by Penner, Dovidio, Piliavin, and Schroeder (2005) , they highlighted such positive benefits as improved self-esteem, academic achievement, personal efficacy, prosocial attitudes, well-being, psychological health, and physical health, as well as decreased negative affect and depression. Hypothesized reasons for the positive effects of prosocial behavior include that they distract from an individual’s own stress and negative emotions, provide a sense of meaning and value, improve perceived competence (i.e., self-esteem and self-efficacy), improve mood (augmenting positive moods and alleviating negative moods), and enhance social integration a sense of community ( Midlarsky, 1991 ).

In line with Organ’s (1988) original conceptualization of OCB having its impact after “summing across time for a single person and also summing across persons in the group, department, organization” (p. 6), it is not surprising that research has revealed a number of positive benefits of helping for group and organizational effectiveness. For instance, the Podsakoff et al. (2009) meta-analysis revealed that unit-level OCB was significantly related to overall unit performance, unit productivity, unit efficiency, unit costs, customer satisfaction, and unit turnover. Nielsen, Hrivnak, and Shaw (2009) performed a similar analysis but distinguished among the specific dimensions of OCB and found that unit-level helping was positively related to unit performance. Also of note was their finding that the relationship between OCB and unit performance was stronger when the items used a unit referent, indicating that the effects of helping may be stronger when it becomes normative in the group (for more on the differences between average levels of OCB and OCB norms, see Ehrhart & Naumann, 2004 ; Ehrhart & Raver, 2014 ; Raver, Ehrhart, & Chadwick, 2012 ). Related to these findings, the effects of norms for helping appear to go beyond the effects of other group process variables like cohesion, relationship conflict, and leadership ( Ehrhart, Bliese, & Thomas, 2006 ), are particularly strong in groups with high task interdependence ( Bachrach, Powell, Collins, & Richey, 2006 ; Nielsen, Bachrach, Sundstrom, & Halfhill, 2012 ), are mediated by group cohesion ( Lin & Peng, 2010 ), and may be due to individuals with more expertise helping those who are less expert ( Van der Vegt et al., 2006 ). In addition, the literature on backing-up behaviors in a team setting supports the idea that helping is beneficial for team performance ( Porter et al., 2003 ).

Although there are a number of positive benefits associated with helping behavior, there are potential negative consequences as well. Perhaps the most commonly discussed negative outcome of performing OCB in general and helping behavior in particular is that it distracts from an individual’s core job responsibilities ( Bergeron, 2007 ; Bolino, Turnley, & Niehoff, 2004 ). Indeed, Bergeron, Shipp, Rosen, and Furst (2013) found that time spent on OCB (using a composite measure) was negatively related to career outcomes such as salary increases and advancement speed. Furthermore, they found that time spent on task performance was negatively correlated with time spent on OCB, suggesting that time spent on one detracts from time spent on the other. Research on backing-up behavior in teams also supports the potentially negative consequences of neglected taskwork, as Barnes et al. (2008) found that a backup provider’s neglected taskwork was negatively correlated with team performance. Also related to this idea is Mueller and Kamdar’s (2011) finding that giving help was negatively related to creativity, which they at least in part attributed to the idea that helping others diminishes time available for creative tasks.

Helping behavior may have additional negative consequences beyond the implications for productivity. For instance, helping behavior may be associated with employee stress ( Bolino et al., 2004 ; Li, Kirkman, & Porter, 2014 ; Organ & Ryan, 1995 ). Halbesleben, Harvey, and Bolino (2009) found that OCB-I was associated with higher levels of work–family conflict. Other research has suggested that it may be specifically the pressure to perform OCB or helping that results in stress. In line with this idea, Bolino, Turnley, Gilstrap, and Suazo (2010) found that citizenship pressure was associated with work–family conflict, work–leisure conflict, job stress, and intentions to quit, and Vigoda-Gadot (2007) found that compulsory citizenship behavior was positively related to stress, burnout, and intentions to leave. In related research, responding to help requests has been shown to deplete regulatory resources, with depletion rates being higher for workers higher in prosocial motivation, possibly because those are the employees who care the most about the quality of their help and who will use more resources when helping ( Lanaj, Johnson, & Wang, 2016 ). In addition to stress and resource depletion, helping behavior may have negative repercussions for coworker relationships. Because helping behavior is associated with increased status within a group ( Hardy & Van Vugt, 2006 ), employees may compete with each other to be seen as the most committed, ideal employee ( Bolino & Turnley, 2003 ; Bolino et al., 2004 ). Related to this idea, research by Parks and Stone (2010) showed that unselfish group members were just as unpopular as selfish members, which they showed could potentially be explained by social comparison (that they make other group members look bad) or because they are a group norm violator (i.e., they threaten the stability of the group). Coworkers may also grow to resent coworkers who they perceive to be helpful only for impression management purposes ( Bolino et al., 2004 ).

Two lines of research have been particularly useful in shedding light on the complexity in understanding the outcomes of helping behavior: research that simultaneously examines the positive and negative outcomes of helping behavior, and research that has identified curvilinear relationships between helping behavior and task performance. With regard to the former, Koopman, Lanaj, and Scott (2016) used experience sampling to show that daily helping was associated with both increased positive affect and decreased work goal progress. Furthermore, increases in positive affect were associated with higher job satisfaction and affective commitment, and decreases in work goal progress were associated with higher emotional satisfaction and lower job satisfaction and affective commitment. Thus, helping appears to have positive and negative consequences simultaneously. With regard to curvilinear relationships with performance, Flynn (2003a) found that balance of favor exchange had an inverted U-shaped relationship with productivity, such that productivity peaked when favor exchange was balanced but declined as employee generosity (giving more than taking) increased. Similarly, Rapp, Bachrach, and Rapp (2013) found that helping behavior had a curvilinear relationship with task performance, such that there was a positive relationship up to moderate levels of helping, but no additional benefits for more helping behavior beyond that point. Thus, although helping may be beneficial up to a point, it may be possible to help too much, such that very high levels detract from one’s core responsibilities. Notably, the evidence also suggests that high levels of helping may not be as harmful for everyone, particularly those who exchange favors/help with coworkers at high rates of frequency ( Flynn, 2003a) or those who have strong time management skills ( Rapp et al., 2013 ). Along similar lines, it could be that the time horizon is important to take into account when evaluating the possible negative consequences of helping. Although helping may have short-term negative consequences, there may be long-term benefits associated with building a strong social network and a reputation for being trustworthy ( Grant, 2013 ).

What Should Future Research Address?

This review has demonstrated that despite the ample literature on helping behavior, research on the topic is spread across multiple fields that consider different aspects of the helping process and even use different terminology. As a result, cross-field and cross-topic communication has been limited, which has hindered broader progress in the area. With regard to the OCB literature in particular, work on helping has tended to focus on the overall helpfulness of individuals over time, the individual and contextual characteristics that predict overall helpfulness, and the outcomes of helping in organizations. Although these topics are critical to our understanding of helping behavior in organizations, in light of the framework in Figure 26.1 , there are a number of aspects of helping processes that have been understudied. To advance the study of helping within the field of OCB, I propose the following directions for future research, organized by three major themes followed by a briefer listing of additional possibilities.

Types of Help

One of the notable findings in this review pertains to the variety of ways that help has been conceptualized and discussed in the literature. Such varieties of helping are not typically considered in the OCB literature, even though the antecedents and outcomes of different types of help are likely to vary. More needs to be known about the types of help and characteristics of help, and how taking them into account could impact some of the traditionally supported findings in the OCB literature. To illustrate, two examples will be briefly presented here: instrumental help versus emotional help, and the quality of the help.

One notable differentiation in the helping literature is between task-related instrumental help and personal, emotional help ( Bamberger, 2009 ). Individuals’ willingness to seek help may vary depending on whether it is instrumental or emotional help they seek, and that willingness may vary depending on the individual’s personality and other characteristics (i.e., some individuals may be more willing to seek instrumental help, whereas others may be more willing to seek emotional help). In terms of who is asked for help, the potential helper’s expertise and capability should be more important for instrumental help, whereas the potential helper’s interpersonal skills and personality should matter more for emotional help. When considering whether to make an offer of help, the primary concern with instrumental help may be the self-esteem implications for the person in need, whereas with emotional help the concern may be the appropriateness for the workplace (based on the workplace’s industry, culture, etc.). Moving to the decision to give help, the potential benefits and costs will likely be viewed differently based on the type of help. Drawing from the arousal: cost-reward model ( Dovidio et al., 1991 ), the unpleasantness experienced by the potential helper may be higher for emotional help. At the same time, the norms in the organization may be that instrumental help is more acceptable than emotional help. In terms of who is willing to help, personality predictors may vary between the types of help, perhaps with agreeableness having a stronger relationship with emotional help given and conscientiousness having a stronger relationship with instrumental help. The motive behind the help could also vary, with emotional help being driven by the relationship with the other individual and empathy, and instrumental help being driven by the desire to help the organization or because it is part of one’s job ( Taber & Deosthali, 2014 ). Finally, with regard to outcomes, it is possible that instrumental help may have a stronger relationship with performance evaluations or group or organization effectiveness, whereas emotional help may be more closely tied to group processes like increased cohesion and decreased relationship conflict.

Another useful example is the quality of the help or the extent to which the help recipient views the help as beneficial. Although this issue has implications for who is asked for help (because individuals would prefer higher quality help that will actually be beneficial), its effects are more likely to be seen for the outcomes of helping. Some of the positive benefits of receiving help in terms of improved performance, creativity, and work quality would likely be ameliorated if the quality of the help received is low. Low-quality help could also damage relationships with peers, resulting in lower quality relationships and decreased trust. Of course, the helper’s motivation may come into play as well; if the quality is low but the helper’s intentions are viewed as sincere, the implications would be different than if the quality is perceived to be low due to the helper’s disinterest or lack of effort. The implications for the help recipient’s self-esteem could vary based on the quality of help; the help recipient may actually receive an ego boost in seeing that others struggle with the same task, especially if his or her efforts are sincere. The quality of the help should have direct implications for reciprocation, with higher quality help resulting in higher levels of indebtedness and thus a higher likelihood of reciprocation ( DePaulo et al., 1983 ; Greenberg, 1980 ). Along those lines, low-quality help could result in downward spirals that result in reduced norms for helping in the work unit; if the help is low quality, then it is less likely to be reciprocated, and the initial helper will be less likely to help again in the future, and so on. In general, the positive implications for the group will be less likely to materialize if the quality of help is low, and it could actually detract from group performance if others have to “undo” problems created by the well-intentioned but flawed help provided, not to mention the wasted productivity and time.

In addition to these two examples, there are a number of other variations that were reviewed in the types of help section, which should have implications across the stages shown in Figure 26.1 . Given that many of these distinctions for the type of help originated in nonorganizational literatures, one challenge for future research will be to determine which distinctions are relevant for organizations, or at least which have the strongest potential effects and thus deserve more research attention.

Help Seeking, Requests for Help, and Offering Help

In the framework in Figure 26.1 , some helping processes have received less attention than others in the organizational literature. For example, given the size of the literatures on both OCB and help seeking, it is surprising that little research has integrated these two literatures. As pointed out previously, most helping in organizations begins with a request for help, so a complete understanding of helping behavior would seem to necessitate an understanding of help seeking, such as the cost-benefit analysis that occurs. Although a number of possible benefits and costs have been suggested in the literature (e.g., Lee, 1997 , 2002 ; Nebus, 2006 ), many of these have not been empirically investigated in work contexts, and the relative prioritization of these costs and benefits for different workers in different contexts is not well understood. Research is particularly needed to understand when higher self-esteem is positively versus negatively related to help seeking ( Chan, 2013 ). The organizational context is likely to also play a critical role; moving beyond supportive or relational climates ( Bamberger, 2009 ; Mossholder et al., 2011 ), the role of strategic climates in the organization should be relevant as well. For instance, in a climate for customer service, seeking help in problems with a customer should yield benefits in terms of advancing the organization’s service goals ( Chan, 2013 ), but the potential costs of appearing incompetent on tasks that are core to the organization’s competence are high. Perhaps it is the combination of a strategic climate and a supportive climate (such as a climate for psychological safety; Baer & Frese, 2003 ) that maximizes the likelihood of help seeking on critical organizational tasks. The outcome of the help request is also an important issue; in particular, we do not know much about what happens when help is refused in terms of consequences for the help seeker, the target of the help request, their relationship, and the work unit as a whole (see Williamson, Clark, Pegalis, & Behan, 1996 , for an example of research related to this topic).

Another issue that is not well understood pertains to help that is offered without a specific request. The characteristics of those who offer help when it is not requested are likely to differ from those who help solely in response to a request, as is the response from the potential help recipient. An offer of help signals that the potential helper is being proactive and anticipating the needs of the potential help recipient, which would seem to be perceived positively (e.g., Broll et al., 1974 ), except that an offer of help could also be viewed as a threat to self-esteem ( Deelstra et al., 2003 ; Schneider et al., 1996 ). In addition, we know little about what distinguishes people who are willing to accept offers of help from those who are not. This is particularly of interest in light of research that individuals tend to overvalue their own perspective and discount the opinions of others ( Harvey & Fischer, 1997 ; Yaniv, 2004 ; Yaniv & Kleinberger, 2000 ). A number of costs and benefits are likely to come into play. For instance, the validity of the need could play a role; if the help is viewed as unnecessary, then the benefits would likely be low, and the offer is more likely to be refused. The self-esteem of the potential help recipient is likely to be a factor in how the costs and benefits are perceived, especially since the offer is likely to be instinctively viewed as a threat initially. Nevertheless, in line with Fisher et al.’s (1982) threat-to-self-esteem model, offers of help that are interpreted as supportive should result in different reactions than those interpreted as threatening. For example, an offer of help within the context of a close, communal relationship ( Nadler & Halabi, 2015 ) or from someone who is highly trusted ( Sniezek & Van Swol, 2001 ) is less likely to be viewed as threatening. A final issue involves the implications for when an offer of help is refused; this could be attributed to the target’s ego or stubbornness, or it could be taken more negatively as a personal slight or a judgment of the help offerer’s (lack of) competence. Such attributions have implications for the relationship between the individuals, as well as for the group’s dynamic and helping norms.

Levels of Analysis

The framework in Figure 26.1 does not explicitly differentiate levels of analysis, but there are multiple levels implied. OCB research has tended to study the individual (or between-person) level, but there are opportunities for research by shifting the level of analysis up (i.e., to the dyad, unit, or organizational level) or down (i.e., to the within-person level and specific episodes of helping).

With regard to the shift up, progress has been made in understanding helping in groups and teams, particularly in terms of outcomes ( Nielsen et al., 2009 ; Podsakoff et al., 2009 ). Relatively less is known about how group norms develop. Leadership appears to play a critical role, whether it be servant leadership ( Ehrhart, 2004 ), ethical leadership ( Mayer et al., 2009 ), leader emphasis on teamwork ( Pearce & Herbik, 2004 ), or leader supportiveness ( Choi, 2009 ). Research on other types of OCB has found an effect for the leader’s role modeling of OCB ( Yaffe & Kark, 2011 ), but the relative effects of leadership style versus leader behavioral role modeling have not been investigated. The role of upper-level leadership deserves more attention; Choi (2009) found that the transformational leadership of top management was related to group-level helping, and Mayer et al. (2009) found that the effects of top management ethical leadership on group-level helping were mediated by supervisor ethical leadership. Research has also shown that issues related to group composition can be problematic for group helping norm development ( Choi, 2009 ; Raver et al., 2012 ); future research should address how to overcome such challenges, especially with regard to the role of leadership.

There are a number of other factors that could play a role in the development, maintenance, and change of group helping norms. Although there is evidence to suggest that the presence of helping behaviors in groups precedes the recognition of the behavior as normative ( Raver et al., 2012 ), research has not addressed whether certain individuals (e.g., those with higher status or higher network centrality) have stronger effects on the formation of helping norms, nor the potential reciprocal relationship between groups norms and individual helping ( Ehrhart & Naumann, 2004 ; Li et al., 2014 ). Future research should also consider the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive OCB norms ( Ehrhart & Naumann, 2004 ; Naumann & Ehrhart, 2011 ), and whether helping norms can become too prescriptive, such that employees feel forced to help and possibly perform counterproductive behaviors in response. Future research should also examine how helping norms can change; Grant and Patil’s (2012) framework for the role of minority influence provides a useful first step in this direction. In addition to norms for helping behavior, research should consider norms for help seeking (i.e., how acceptable is it to ask for help?) and norms for offering help (i.e., how acceptable is it to offer help?). Finally, the organizational level of analysis also deserves more attention, perhaps by studying organizational-level helping norms as a layer of organizational culture ( Rousseau, 1990 ; Schein, 2010 ) or the relative influence of organizational versus group norms.

In terms of lower levels of analysis, the focus on helping episodes that is common in literature on other helping-related topics, like help seeking, is relatively limited in the OCB literature. In contrast to studying individuals’ general helpfulness over time and across situations, a within-person approach highlights how individuals may respond differently to individual helping episodes based on a variety of variables. The chapter by Scott, Matta, and Koopman in this handbook provides a thorough review of the literature on within-person approaches to studying OCB in general, so that will not be repeated here. Nevertheless, it is notable that although some articles in their review did include a specific focus on helping or OCB-I (e.g., Conway, Rogelberg, & Pitts, 2009 ; Halbesleben & Wheeler, 2011 ; Ilies et al., 2006 ; Koopman et al., 2016 ; Trougakos, Beal, Cheng, Hideg, & Zweig, 2015 ), most of the literature in this area has investigated OCB in general (aggregating across OCB dimensions), rather than specific dimensions of OCB. Such an approach is likely to miss important differences, especially in light of their finding that almost half of the variance in OCB-I was explained by within-person variance, which was more than what was found for OCB-O. As an example, Ilies et al. (2006) initially found that both job satisfaction and positive affect had intraindividual effects on OCB, but when analyzing OCB-I separately from OCB-O, found that only positive affect was an intraindividual predictor of OCB-I.

This chapter has raised a number additional specific issues that are likely to manifest in any given helping episode that also contribute to the within-person variation in helping. Such issues include the nature of the specific problem (such as whether it is task related or personal), the effort required to provide the help, the presence of a request for help or not, the person targeted for a helping request, whether the help is visible to others, and whether help is part of an ongoing exchange between the parties. Research using experience sampling methodologies that takes into account as many of these episode-specific factors would provide a deeper understanding of how helping dynamics play out in organizational settings. Adding even more complexity, research can extend the within-person approach to study helping episodes from a longitudinal, dynamic perspective, such as in Halbesleben and Wheeler’s (2015) research on spirals of support, or look at how group-level variables combined with between-person variables to affect within-person helping.

Additional Topics for Future Research

In addition to pursuing research on the previous three topics, there are a number of other issues that are worthy of research attention. Several very interesting findings with regard to curvilinear relationships were uncovered in this review, including between self-esteem and help-seeking behavior ( Chan, 2013 ), between the need for help and help seeking ( Bamberger, 2009 ), between helping seeking and performance evaluations ( Nadler et al., 2003 ), between favor exchange and productivity ( Flynn, 2003a) , and between helping behavior and performance ( Rapp et al., 2013 ). Such findings add complexity and insight beyond simplistic “either-or” or “more is better” thinking and, in particular, may be critical for understanding the simultaneous positive and negative effects of helping ( Koopman et al., 2016 ).

Much in the same way that help seeking is typically studied independently from helping behavior, reciprocation processes are typically distinct from studies of helping in the OCB literature. This is unfortunate, since any act of helping immediately raises numerous issues related to reciprocation. For instance, was the help given as reciprocation or not? Will the help result in future reciprocation? If help is not reciprocated, what are the implications of the lack of reciprocation for helping between the members of the dyad and, furthermore, for the effectiveness of the overall group? Increased integration between the reciprocation and OCB literatures is needed.

Although some helping studies have integrated social networking , there are still numerous potential directions for future research. For instance, most social networking research related to helping focuses on advice networks, which is a very specific type of help, but other types of helping merit attention with regard to social networking. In addition, helping could be investigated as a dependent variable in research on other types of networks, such as friendship or communication networks. In line with the earlier discussion on levels of analysis, one benefit of social networking approaches is that they allow for analyses across the individual, dyadic, and unit levels.

The visibility of the help is not well understood, and it could have implications in several different ways. For instance, the social costs to the self-esteem of the help recipient are likely to be higher when others are present when the help is requested and/or provided ( Bamberger, 2009 ), and research has shown that help that is “invisible,” or outside of the recipient’s awareness, has more positive effects ( Bolger & Amarel, 2007 ; Bolger et al., 2000 ). At the same time, visibility would appear to be generally desirable on the part of the help provider. To achieve some of the benefits of helping others, such as praise or admiration ( Dovidio et al., 1991 ), the help would need to be visible, much in the same way visibility would be desirable when motivated by impression management ( Grant & Mayer, 2009 ; Rioux & Penner, 2001 ). There are exceptions in both cases; individuals can actually be perceived as more competent when seeking help ( Brooks et al., 2015 ), and the potential help provider may try to avoid visibility if the request for help is going to be denied ( Dovidio et al., 1991 ). More research is needed on how these various concerns are balanced within a helping episode.

There have been a number of recent developments in the literature on volunteering ( Rodell et al., 2016 ), which raises the question of the similarities and differences between the antecedents and outcomes of helping others at work versus helping others outside of work. For instance, Rodell (2013) examined whether employees were more likely to volunteer when experiencing high job meaningfulness (an enhancement effect) or low job meaningfulness (a compensation effect). The helping literature has typically taken an enhancement perspective, but it should consider whether helping others may be an “escape” from a job that lacks meaning. Another question is whether employees who volunteer are also those employees who help their coworkers, or whether some employees are willing to help those outside the organization (volunteering) but not their own coworkers.

These future directions only scratch the surface of the opportunities for new insights and knowledge that can be gained by integrating across the various perspectives on helping that have been addressed in this review. Although helping behavior has received much attention in the OCB literature, there is still much work to do.

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Directions for Future Research

Family Firms and Family Constitution

ISBN : 978-1-83797-203-6 , eISBN : 978-1-83797-200-5

Publication date: 14 December 2023

This chapter focuses on the ideas and proposals of the “conference,” i.e., suggestions for future research put forward by the conference participants as a group, working for two days on this subject. These research proposals include inter alia: the potential difference between the family constitution in its written form and the constitution in its practiced form; heterogeneity versus standardization of family constitution content (because of some dominating consulting approaches); the effect of national legal frameworks and traditions on the prevalence of the family constitution and its content in different countries; opportunities in large sample quantitative studies.

• Family constitution
• Development stage of the family constitution
• Application stage of the family constitution
• Gap between practice and written family constitution
• Revising the family constitution
• Heterogeneity versus standardization of family constitutions
• National legal framework’s effect on the family constitution
• Intra-family conflicts as club/public goods problem

Fleischer, H. and Prigge, S. (2023), "Directions for Future Research", Fleischer, H. and Prigge, S. (Ed.) Family Firms and Family Constitution ( Law and Management of Family Firms ), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 253-256. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83797-200-520231019

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2024 Holger Fleischer and Stefan Prigge

This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this book (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

The Hamburg Conference: Law and Management of Family Firms is a research conference. So, what are the main findings of the conference in terms of recommendations for future research? In this short chapter, we would like to highlight the specific contributions of this conference . “Specific” meaning that we do not want to develop the broad, encompassing picture of research opportunities in the field of family constitutions in general. Those ideas developed in extant literature are covered to a large extent in the surveying chapters by Fleischer, and Prigge and Mengers. Instead, this chapter focuses on the ideas and proposals of the “conference,” i.e., suggestions put forward by the conference participants as a group, working for two days on this subject. Thus, our role in this chapter is only that of clerks, documenting what originated from the joint work of the participants.

There was great consensus that the family constitution as an object of analysis has to be understood as a phenomenon consisting of two stages: the development stage and the application stage. Moreover, during the second stage, actual practice might diverge from the written form, thus, a further distinction between written form (document) and practice might be necessary. To be sure, these are by far not brand-new findings, however, they have major implications for any analysis of the effects or the determinants of a family constitution. (From here on, the term “family constitution” is used to designate the complete phenomenon, including all stages; if only a certain stage or aspect of the family constitution is discussed, it will be explicitly indicated.) Some of these implications matter for the research topics discussed in what follows.

There was also great unity, that the development stage is of huge importance; it was even speculated that it might be as important or even more important than the application stage. That points to a highly relevant research field: What is the relative significance of development and application stage? Is it possible to separate the effects of the development stage on family and business from those of the application period? Another item in this research field is whether, and if so, how, the process for the initial family constitution differs from that for the revised family constitution.

Discussions often returned to the question of what extent the written rules of the family constitution are practiced. This issue implies that the document does not necessarily reflect the reality in the owner family. This is another area offering interesting research opportunities: To begin with an inventory topic, more information would be welcomed on whether this gap actually exists. Furthermore, it is of great interest how families deal with behavior diverging from the written rules. To name just two possibilities: Do they accept or even welcome it as flexible handling of rules in a complex and changing environment, or do they acquiesce grumblingly the rule violation by some family members simply because of a lack of enforcement options? In addition to that, if we know more about the gap between practice and written rules, it is easier to evaluate the informative value of document analyses of family constitutions.

Heterogeneity versus standardization was another major topic in our discussions. Heterogeneity among owner families and among family businesses is a major issue in current family firm management research. The conference added a new ingredient to this discussion stream as it explored the hypothesis that there is a trend toward the standardization of family constitutions. (This part of our discussions based mainly on experiences from Germany.) The argument rests on the observation that there are only a few major players in the market for family constitution advisory services. Concentration is even stronger as former employees of these significant players more or less follow their old employer’s approach when they offer family constitution services on their own. In the development stage and in the written document, the assumed standardized approach of the consultants meets family heterogeneity. Ex ante it is an open question whether and to what extent this assumed homogenizing effect indeed leads to more homogeneous development processes and documents. For the practiced family constitution in the application period, there are only the (heterogenous) families acting, the potentially homogenizing effect of the consultants works only indirectly via their influence on the development process and document. Thus, it could be questioned whether the assumed standardization really goes beyond the structures of development process and document, resp., if it exists at all. In any case, this is another research field that could contribute valuable knowledge about family constitutions.

The degree of family constitutions’ (understood in the very broad meaning) homogeneity is also seriously linked to large sample empirical studies. Graves et al. with the very first or one of the first large sample studies with a separate variable for the existence of a family constitution represent a significant advancement compared to previous large sample studies with a 0/1 composite family governance indicator variable. But the interpretation of studies like the one provided by Graves et al. depends very much on homogeneity. Generally speaking, a 0/1 indicator variable requires the assumption that the state which is coded “1” is homogeneous. However, if the variable “1” represents significantly heterogeneous development processes, document content, and constitution practices, the variable would only be statistically significant in a regression analysis if the family constitution (in the broadest meaning) exerts, despite all heterogeneity, a unified force on dependent variables like family or business performance. Insignificant results of a 0/1 family constitution variable need not necessarily indicate the absence of a link to the dependent variable, they could also be a consequence of the diverse settings represented by “1.” Besides analyzing whether the assumed heterogeneity exists at all, small sample studies (single or multiple case studies) could try to develop more finely granulated variables to measure family constitutions, i.e., variables that go beyond 0/1 and reflect features like quality or issues dealt with in family constitutions (in the broadest meaning).

The few large sample studies provided so far ignore the time dimension. The 0/1 family constitution variable does not reflect how many years ago the development process was concluded. This lack of consideration of the time dimension is particularly relevant if the development process is assumed to be so eminently important. From a technical perspective, the integration of this variable in the analysis of the large sample studies should be possible without problems. But most probably, that information was not collected. The results for such a time variable could contribute to estimate the relative importance of development stage compared to application stage.

Analyzing family governance and, in this case, family constitutions require a theoretical foundation. So far, research of family firm management has been a net importer of theories and concepts from other economic fields that were then adapted for application in family firm management. An innovative idea was developed in the discussions. It bases on the observation that intra-family conflicts often root in conflicts between the interests of the individual family member and the interest of the family (and the family firm) at large. This structure resembles the basic problem occurring with club/public goods. For these goods, it might be that individual and collective rationality conflict with each other, leading to suboptimal outcomes for everybody. This field of research has been developed over decades, yielding a rich set of analytical approaches and mechanisms to mitigate such negative effects. It might be worthwhile to study whether this similarity could be exploited to transfer some of the concepts developed for these goods to the family firm context.

Another aspect from the discussion that points at a worthwhile research field is linked to the international dimension. Part of the conference discussions focused on the reasoning that different cultures have different ideas of the family and family cohesion which in turn could be expected to have an effect on the family constitution. This cultural component of the international dimension might not be new to the literature, so it does not need further consideration here, but a second nuance of the international dimension was also developed in the discussion. Its interdisciplinary character fits very nicely to the very basic idea of this conference series. It was debated that the respective national legal framework might have an effect on how the family constitution document might be set up. What is already regulated in national laws or typically settled in other legal documents? What is the probability that some kind of legally binding power is or will be attached to the family constitution? If such effects of the legal framework on the family constitution exist, it would not be a surprise if this in turn then affects the development process and the family constitution practice.

From a legal point of view, participants conjectured that the legal effects of family constitutions might become stronger in the future – a prediction that deserves further attention. In addition to that, it will also be interesting to observe whether certain types of family constitutions will travel around the world as private legal transplants, comparable to certain types of M&A contracts. Furthermore, one could explore more closely how different legal systems integrate the various legal sources of family governance into a coherent framework. As far as the emerging corporate governance industry for family businesses is concerned, it may be promising to examine the influence and market share of competing actors such as lawyers, accountants, and management consultants in shaping family constitutions, both nationally and internationally.

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Since their appointments earlier this year as senior associate vice provosts, Jennifer Cochran (for research) and Judith “ Jodi ” Prochaska (for clinical research governance) have been working to support researchers, identify new opportunities, and facilitate collaborations among the diverse community supported by Stanford University’s Office of the Vice Provost and Dean of Research (VPDoR).

Judith “Jodi” Prochaska and Jennifer Cochran are senior associate vice provosts, respectively, for clinical research governance and for research, in the office of the Vice Provost and Dean of Research. (Image credit: Andrew Brodhead)

Cochran, a bioengineer, and Prochaska, a clinical psychologist, met over a decade ago during a year-long School of Medicine leadership program. Each brings a diverse portfolio of service and leadership to their roles in the VPDoR. Cochran is the former chair of the Department of Bioengineering and still serves as the faculty director of the Innovative Medicines Accelerator Protein Therapeutics Initiative. Prochaska is a professor in the Department of Medicine, deputy director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, faculty director of the Master of Science in Community Health and Prevention Research program, and a treating clinician with addiction medicine privileges at Stanford Health Care.

Since January, the two have spent time listening, learning, and exploring the breadth and scope of responsibilities under the VPDoR.

Here, Cochran and Prochaska discuss with Stanford Report their backgrounds, some early learnings and achievements in their 3-year terms, and their aspirations as faculty leaders.

This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

For those unfamiliar with your roles, what do the SAVP for Research and the SAVP for Clinical Research Governance do to support faculty, researchers, and their teams?

Prochaska: Stanford’s clinical research portfolio has grown exponentially and extended geographically, and this volume requires coordinated oversight and support. The SAVP-Clinical Research Governance role aims to help Stanford’s clinical research achieve the highest ethical standards and comply with all applicable regulatory requirements. To that end, I support the VPDoR’s mission to facilitate, nurture, and safeguard a thriving research ecosystem focusing on clinical research.

Cochran: As the SAVP-Research, I help develop strategy and planning for innovative research initiatives and opportunities that strengthen collaboration across campus – this includes the 15 research institutes, centers, and laboratories managed under VPDoR, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the Office of Technology Licensing, among others. Over the past few months, I have been working on a range of special projects in partnership with [Vice Provost and Dean of Research] Kathryn “Kam” Moler, allowing a unique opportunity for a firsthand view of the scope and mission of the VPDoR. I’m still building my portfolio, yet I am grateful for what we have accomplished in a short period of time.

What aspects of the role have been the most inspirational, and are there any highlights you can share?

Cochran: We have been working on building stronger ties between Stanford and SLAC researchers by re-imagining physical space at the Arrillaga Science Center at SLAC, with a goal to leverage the ground-breaking science happening across the campuses. It’s been inspiring to lead a community process where groups could pitch ideas for this space with the goals of advancing cutting-edge research and enhancing collaboration. The bold and impactful program proposals we have seen from teams across campus make me optimistic for the future, not only for these enabling partnerships but for the world that will benefit from them. I have also been grateful to serve on the SLAC Director Search Committee, which has offered an opportunity to hear from SLAC and campus stakeholders about their vision for the future at such a critical time.

Prochaska: The local and at-large community looks to Stanford Health Care for its renowned patient care. In federal Fiscal Year 2022, Stanford University received more than $650 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health for more than 1,100 research awards. I’ve been on a listening tour to build an understanding of the opportunities, successes, and challenges within Stanford’s clinical research ecosystem. An example of the extent of the research, on a single day in March 2023, there were 9,191 active human subject protocols: 97% were within Stanford School of Medicine, 77% identified Stanford Health Care, and 27% Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital as clinical sites, 21% were clinical trials, of which 11% were industry sponsored. This is a lot of science with many people responsible for leading and managing the research, and for some, the research is providing training opportunities. It has been inspiring hearing from leaders in research and health care delivery about their vision, achievements, and challenges in clinical research growth at Stanford. For example, the strategic partnership between Stanford School of Medicine and Stanford Health Care is calling for the expansion of clinical research to community affiliates, research training, education, and regulatory support.

What do you believe are some research opportunities on the horizon for Stanford, and how do you hope your role will support the university’s progress in these areas?

Cochran: In addition to fostering stronger ties with our colleagues at SLAC, there are exciting research opportunities percolating in broad areas such as AI, quantum, semiconductors, and astrophysics. Moreover, building on almost a century of innovations in electrical engineering and computer science is a renaissance in the life sciences and biotechnology that is poised to have transformative impacts locally and globally. The broad theme of “synthesis” applied to biology (i.e., synthetic biology) is a burgeoning area of research with cross-cutting opportunities across all of Stanford, including fundamental science, policy, medicine, engineering, sustainability, and arts and humanities. Working with President Tessier-Lavigne, VPDoR Kam Moler and Deans Lloyd Minor, Jennifer Widom, and Arun Majumdar, among others, we’ve begun supporting a diverse and outstanding community of faculty, postdocs, and students to develop a strong foundation from which to support ongoing and future work in this space ( sb.stanford.edu ). In parallel, to facilitate the translational aspects of technologies resulting from these activities, 85 acres of the adjacent Stanford Research Park have been earmarked to create a 21st-century biotechnology hub. I’m extremely passionate about how we can best help this ecosystem grow and thrive to benefit all, in addition to supporting all the exciting research on campus.

Prochaska: Stanford’s continued innovations in cancer diagnosis and treatment for our local community and beyond, by leveraging new technologies and discoveries, are areas I believe will further solidify our purposeful impact. I believe the VPDoR can help by supporting more collaborative team science and equipping clinical researchers with the facilities and instruments to fuel their ideas.

How is your own research career influencing the approach you bring to this role?

Prochaska: At Stanford, I conduct clinical research, treat and supervise patient care, and direct a master’s program that is research oriented. I know the excitement of a new discovery and value the applied training opportunities possible with team science. From personal experience, I am sensitive to the increasing time demands of federal regulatory oversight and contracting. I also bring an eye to supporting greater efficiencies and streamlining processes to support research activities with integrity. Collaboration and authentic interactions are critical to building trust. In my community-based research, hearing perspectives and identifying challenges and successes before intervening allows the solution to be targeted and hopefully effective. On my listening tour, I have been doing just that: listening and building my understanding, mapping the lay of the land with data, and conducting a needs assessment.

Cochran: My career has been driven by opportunities for combining different scientific areas to tackle impactful problems. My degrees are in biochemistry and chemistry. My postdoctoral training was in biological engineering, and then I completed a fellowship in biophysics. One of the reasons I was thrilled to come to Stanford nearly two decades ago was the ability to be immersed in the interdisciplinary ecosystem that makes our institution so special – in fact, I spent the first 10 years of my career here in the Clark Center, home of Bio-X. Joining the VPDoR team provides an unprecedented opportunity to engage with and support the breadth of research endeavors across campus, including and beyond the life sciences. Bringing my own experiences in convening groups of people with diverse expertise around important shared goals, I hope we can accomplish some remarkable things.

Lastly, how can faculty, researchers, and our staff across campus collaborate with you or the office of the VPDoR?

Prochaska: Given my focus on clinical research governance, I would welcome hearing from faculty or researchers needing problem-solving with encountered challenges or who have identified process improvements that can be scaled. Success for me would be developing new academic-clinical partnerships, supporting training opportunities in clinical research, and fostering clinical research to practice discoveries. Helping Stanford PIs develop, implement, and disseminate their science with integrity and efficiency is our aim.

Cochran: Likewise, I hope to serve as a connector and conduit to link faculty with teams and resources within VPDoR and elsewhere in our ecosystem to help facilitate their success. Sometimes there will be an easy path forward and other times I hope to build a stronger understanding of their unique needs to inform our processes and best practices. Sharing examples with the community of how our office has helped faculty and units ensure preeminence and purpose in their research would be a great win for all.

Cochran is also director of the Stanford/NIH Biotechnology pre-doctoral training program. She has launched multiple startups in the fields of oncology and regenerative medicine. Prochaska’s research program leverages technology to study and treat tobacco use and multiple risk behaviors, spanning community-based epidemiologic studies, randomized controlled trials, and policy analysis.

Suggestions for Future Research

Your dissertation needs to include suggestions for future research. Depending on requirements of your university, suggestions for future research can be either integrated into Research Limitations section or it can be a separate section.

You will need to propose 4-5 suggestions for future studies and these can include the following:

1. Building upon findings of your research . These may relate to findings of your study that you did not anticipate. Moreover, you may suggest future research to address unanswered aspects of your research problem.

2. Addressing limitations of your research . Your research will not be free from limitations and these may relate to formulation of research aim and objectives, application of data collection method, sample size, scope of discussions and analysis etc. You can propose future research suggestions that address the limitations of your study.

3. Constructing the same research in a new context, location and/or culture . It is most likely that you have addressed your research problem within the settings of specific context, location and/or culture. Accordingly, you can propose future studies that can address the same research problem in a different settings, context, location and/or culture.

4. Re-assessing and expanding theory, framework or model you have addressed in your research . Future studies can address the effects of specific event, emergence of a new theory or evidence and/or other recent phenomenon on your research problem.

My e-book,  The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Dissertation in Business Studies: a step by step assistance  offers practical assistance to complete a dissertation with minimum or no stress. The e-book covers all stages of writing a dissertation starting from the selection to the research area to submitting the completed version of the work within the deadline. John Dudovskiy

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Implications in Research – Types, Examples and Writing Guide

Table of Contents

Implications in Research

Implications in research refer to the potential consequences, applications, or outcomes of the findings and conclusions of a research study. These can include both theoretical and practical implications that extend beyond the immediate scope of the study and may impact various stakeholders, such as policymakers, practitioners, researchers , or the general public.

Structure of Implications

The format of implications in research typically follows the structure below:

• Restate the main findings: Begin by restating the main findings of the study in a brief summary .
• Link to the research question/hypothesis : Clearly articulate how the findings are related to the research question /hypothesis.
• Discuss the practical implications: Discuss the practical implications of the findings, including their potential impact on the field or industry.
• Discuss the theoretical implications : Discuss the theoretical implications of the findings, including their potential impact on existing theories or the development of new ones.
• Identify limitations: Identify the limitations of the study and how they may affect the generalizability of the findings.
• Suggest directions for future research: Suggest areas for future research that could build on the current study’s findings and address any limitations.

Types of Implications in Research

Types of Implications in Research are as follows:

Theoretical Implications

These are the implications that a study has for advancing theoretical understanding in a particular field. For example, a study that finds a new relationship between two variables can have implications for the development of theories and models in that field.

Practical Implications

These are the implications that a study has for solving practical problems or improving real-world outcomes. For example, a study that finds a new treatment for a disease can have implications for improving the health of patients.

Methodological Implications

These are the implications that a study has for advancing research methods and techniques. For example, a study that introduces a new method for data analysis can have implications for how future research in that field is conducted.

Ethical Implications

These are the implications that a study has for ethical considerations in research. For example, a study that involves human participants must consider the ethical implications of the research on the participants and take steps to protect their rights and welfare.

Policy Implications

These are the implications that a study has for informing policy decisions. For example, a study that examines the effectiveness of a particular policy can have implications for policymakers who are considering whether to implement or change that policy.

Societal Implications

These are the implications that a study has for society as a whole. For example, a study that examines the impact of a social issue such as poverty or inequality can have implications for how society addresses that issue.

Forms of Implications In Research

Forms of Implications are as follows:

Positive Implications

These refer to the positive outcomes or benefits that may result from a study’s findings. For example, a study that finds a new treatment for a disease can have positive implications for patients, healthcare providers, and the wider society.

Negative Implications

These refer to the negative outcomes or risks that may result from a study’s findings. For example, a study that finds a harmful side effect of a medication can have negative implications for patients, healthcare providers, and the wider society.

Direct Implications

These refer to the immediate consequences of a study’s findings. For example, a study that finds a new method for reducing greenhouse gas emissions can have direct implications for policymakers and businesses.

Indirect Implications

These refer to the broader or long-term consequences of a study’s findings. For example, a study that finds a link between childhood trauma and mental health issues can have indirect implications for social welfare policies, education, and public health.

Importance of Implications in Research

The following are some of the reasons why implications are important in research:

• To inform policy and practice: Research implications can inform policy and practice decisions by providing evidence-based recommendations for actions that can be taken to address the issues identified in the research. This can lead to more effective policies and practices that are grounded in empirical evidence.
• To guide future research: Implications can also guide future research by identifying areas that need further investigation, highlighting gaps in current knowledge, and suggesting new directions for research.
• To increase the impact of research : By communicating the practical and theoretical implications of their research, researchers can increase the impact of their work by demonstrating its relevance and importance to a wider audience.
• To enhance the credibility of research : Implications can help to enhance the credibility of research by demonstrating that the findings have practical and theoretical significance and are not just abstract or academic exercises.
• To foster collaboration and engagement : Implications can also foster collaboration and engagement between researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders by providing a common language and understanding of the practical and theoretical implications of the research.

Example of Implications in Research

Here are some examples of implications in research:

• Medical research: A study on the efficacy of a new drug for a specific disease can have significant implications for medical practitioners, patients, and pharmaceutical companies. If the drug is found to be effective, it can be used to treat patients with the disease, improve their health outcomes, and generate revenue for the pharmaceutical company.
• Educational research: A study on the impact of technology on student learning can have implications for educators and policymakers. If the study finds that technology improves student learning outcomes, educators can incorporate technology into their teaching methods, and policymakers can allocate more resources to technology in schools.
• Social work research: A study on the effectiveness of a new intervention program for individuals with mental health issues can have implications for social workers, mental health professionals, and policymakers. If the program is found to be effective, social workers and mental health professionals can incorporate it into their practice, and policymakers can allocate more resources to the program.
• Environmental research: A study on the impact of climate change on a particular ecosystem can have implications for environmentalists, policymakers, and industries. If the study finds that the ecosystem is at risk, environmentalists can advocate for policy changes to protect the ecosystem, policymakers can allocate resources to mitigate the impact of climate change, and industries can adjust their practices to reduce their carbon footprint.
• Economic research: A study on the impact of minimum wage on employment can have implications for policymakers and businesses. If the study finds that increasing the minimum wage does not lead to job losses, policymakers can implement policies to increase the minimum wage, and businesses can adjust their payroll practices.

How to Write Implications in Research

Writing implications in research involves discussing the potential outcomes or consequences of your findings and the practical applications of your study’s results. Here are some steps to follow when writing implications in research:

• Summarize your key findings: Before discussing the implications of your research, briefly summarize your key findings. This will provide context for your implications and help readers understand how your research relates to your conclusions.
• Identify the implications: Identify the potential implications of your research based on your key findings. Consider how your results might be applied in the real world, what further research might be necessary, and what other areas of study could be impacted by your research.
• Connect implications to research question: Make sure that your implications are directly related to your research question or hypotheses. This will help to ensure that your implications are relevant and meaningful.
• Consider limitations : Acknowledge any limitations or weaknesses of your research, and discuss how these might impact the implications of your research. This will help to provide a more balanced view of your findings.
• Discuss practical applications : Discuss the practical applications of your research and how your findings could be used in real-world situations. This might include recommendations for policy or practice changes, or suggestions for future research.
• Be clear and concise : When writing implications in research, be clear and concise. Use simple language and avoid jargon or technical terms that might be confusing to readers.
• Provide a strong conclusion: Provide a strong conclusion that summarizes your key implications and leaves readers with a clear understanding of the significance of your research.

Purpose of Implications in Research

The purposes of implications in research include:

• Informing practice: The implications of research can provide guidance for practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders about how to apply research findings in practical settings.
• Generating new research questions: Implications can also inspire new research questions that build upon the findings of the original study.
• Identifying gaps in knowledge: Implications can help to identify areas where more research is needed to fully understand a phenomenon.
• Promoting scientific literacy: Implications can also help to promote scientific literacy by communicating research findings in accessible and relevant ways.
• Facilitating decision-making : The implications of research can assist decision-makers in making informed decisions based on scientific evidence.
• Contributing to theory development : Implications can also contribute to the development of theories by expanding upon or challenging existing theories.

When to Write Implications in Research

Here are some specific situations of when to write implications in research:

• Research proposal : When writing a research proposal, it is important to include a section on the potential implications of the research. This section should discuss the potential impact of the research on the field and its potential applications.
• Literature review : The literature review is an important section of the research paper where the researcher summarizes existing knowledge on the topic. This is also a good place to discuss the potential implications of the research. The researcher can identify gaps in the literature and suggest areas for further research.
• Conclusion or discussion section : The conclusion or discussion section is where the researcher summarizes the findings of the study and interprets their meaning. This is a good place to discuss the implications of the research and its potential impact on the field.

Advantages of Implications in Research

Implications are an important part of research that can provide a range of advantages. Here are some of the key advantages of implications in research:

• Practical applications: Implications can help researchers to identify practical applications of their research findings, which can be useful for practitioners and policymakers who are interested in applying the research in real-world contexts.
• Improved decision-making: Implications can also help decision-makers to make more informed decisions based on the research findings. By clearly identifying the implications of the research, decision-makers can understand the potential outcomes of their decisions and make better choices.
• Future research directions : Implications can also guide future research directions by highlighting areas that require further investigation or by suggesting new research questions. This can help to build on existing knowledge and fill gaps in the current understanding of a topic.
• Increased relevance: By highlighting the implications of their research, researchers can increase the relevance of their work to real-world problems and challenges. This can help to increase the impact of their research and make it more meaningful to stakeholders.
• Enhanced communication : Implications can also help researchers to communicate their findings more effectively to a wider audience. By highlighting the practical applications and potential benefits of their research, researchers can engage with stakeholders and communicate the value of their work more clearly.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

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Pharmacokinetics and Drug Interactions in the Elderly and Special Issues in Elderly African-American Populations: Workshop Summary (1997)

Chapter: 3 conclusions and future research directions, conclusions and future research directions.

The ongoing study of pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and drug interactions in elderly persons is critical for the development of safe and effective therapies and for the prevention of drug toxicities and adverse drug reactions. Aging is associated with an increase in chronic illness and anatomical and physiological changes that affect drug distribution, metabolism, and excretion. Thus, as the number of older Americans increases, it can be expected that polypharmacy in this population will have significant health, social, and economic consequences. Additionally, research should focus on alleviating the disease burden in elderly minority populations.

Box 3.1 summarizes the committee's conclusions regarding future directions for research in this field. The remainder of this chapter provides a more detailed discussion of the committee's conclusions.

RESEARCH NEEDS AND OPPORTUNITIES

Expanding the scientific knowledge base.

Although progress has been made in understanding the aging process, there is still a paucity of data at the intracellular, organ, system, and population levels. The impact of aging on cells and organ systems has commonly been studied in isolation; however, a more integrated approach is needed that will examine the effects of aging on the body. Pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic models need to be developed that encompass the entire range of changes occurring at multiple levels throughout the body.

The following list highlights specific areas of research that would add to the body of knowledge and clarify our understanding of the aging process especially with regard to improving pharmacotherapy. This list is by no means comprehensive, as numerous research avenues could yield important information on the impact of pharmacotherapy and drug interactions in the elderly. Areas for future research include the impact of aging, gender, genetics, and ethnicity on physiology and metabolic processes. Specifically,

age-related changes in cellular transport mechanisms and extrahepatic metabolism and transport including the activity of different enzyme isoforms;

biomarkers of drug exposure;

mechanisms that cause variable responses to medications in aging racial and ethnic populations;

age-related hormonal changes affecting drug metabolism or drug sensitivity;

the impact of nutrition on the aging process;

mechanisms underlying diseases prevalent in the elderly (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis, and Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease);

in vitro models for multiple drug regimens and multiple drug interactions that may be predictive of and correlated with in vivo research;

models for drug interaction related to altered reflex activity and changing homeostatic mechanisms;

the potential beneficial and adverse health effects of nutraceuticals; and

social and psychological aspects of medication use in the elderly (e.g., access to medications, adherence to prescription regimens), with a special emphasis on minority populations.

Addressing Issues in Minority Populations

Many diseases are disproportionately prevalent in elderly African-American and other minority populations. The causes and implications of this excess burden need to be more completely understood and addressed. For example, hypertension and the impact of antihypertensive medications in elderly African Americans have not been fully studied even though the morbidity and mortality is higher in this population than in other segments of the aging population.

Research is needed on multiple levels (molecular, cellular, system, population) to clarify the effect of race and ethnicity on disease prevalence and on variations in the effectiveness of pharmacotherapeutic and other treatment interventions. Such research would be a valuable tool in increasing our understanding of the physiology of aging for all populations and may have implications for pharmacotherapies aimed at various elderly groups. Research on diseases and health conditions that primarily affect minority elderly populations needs to be a priority to alleviate the disease burden experienced by these populations.

Recruitment of Elderly Patients into Clinical Trials

In 1989, the FDA published a guideline for the inclusion of elderly persons in clinical trials (FDA, 1989). However, a number of characteristics of the elderly population may present barriers to conducting clinical trials that are representative of this population. Studies need to include the oldest segment of the population (see Chapter 2 ). In addition, subgroups of the elderly population should be stratified based primarily on their functional status and disease burden and less on their chronological age.

Recruiting minorities for inclusion in studies should be a priority, although it is important to recognize the trends toward multiracial backgrounds and the complexities associated with categorizing race or ethnicity. The workshop speakers presented many innovative ideas about increasing the recruitment of minority populations. The committee supports a number of approaches, including providing transportation, involving the minority community, providing extensive patient education, and decentralizing clinical trials (i.e.., going to patients' homes or to community centers to provide and assess treatment). In addition, collaborative efforts and consortia need to be strengthened between historically minority and other academic institutions. These partnerships will be vital to recruiting minority investigators and to attracting and sustaining minority students in research programs. Further, patient recruitment efforts can draw on the populations available to both institutions.

Obtaining informed consent in elderly populations involves complex issues that need to be addressed including the extent of dementia or cognitive impairment in some elderly patients and their vulnerability to coercion. Informed consent forms have evolved into highly technical legal documents, and a reevaluation of how to best meet their original purpose is needed. Other ethical issues that need to be addressed include studies on vulnerable populations (e.g., nursing home residents) and the confidentiality of patient information.

Research Methodologies and Tools

Trials of acute drug use are well funded; however, there are few long-term studies that examine chronic effects and drug interactions. Inasmuch as elderly persons are living longer and may take the same medications for many years, increased postmarketing surveillance is needed to examine the effects of long-term use of drugs. Incentives to strengthen postmarketing surveillance should be considered. Some of these drugs (e.g., hormone replacement therapy, antidepressants, and lipid-lowering medications) may be used as preventive measures (e.g., treating high cholesterol levels in the absence of cardiovascular disease or prescribing hormone replacement therapy to prevent hip fractures); however, their long-term health effects are not fully known. Further, the pharmacodynamics of many of these medications are only beginning to be investigated.

Research Methodologies

Studying the impact of pharmacotherapy on the elderly population is often difficult from a methodological standpoint. Cross-sectional studies are problematic because confounding variables abound among the elderly, and it is difficult to distinguish the effects of aging from those of disease. Randomized clini-

cal trials often recruit study subjects who represent the younger segments of the elderly population, and who have fewer comorbid conditions, use fewer medications, and may be more compliant in terms of following prescription medication regimens. In addition, many studies use small numbers of patients, frequently with homogenous geographic and ethnic backgrounds. Longitudinal studies are needed that involve large numbers of patients who reflect the diversity of “real world” populations. Furthermore, studies of elderly populations should include observational studies, case-control studies, and cohort studies to take advantage of the realm of methodological approaches that are available. Studies of optimal pharmacotherapies need to consider their cost-effectiveness and delivery. Outcome measures must also be reexamined, and quality-of-life outcomes need to be considered. One workshop speaker recalled the adage that, “adding life to years is at least as important as adding years to life.”

Databases Available for Research

There is a notable lack of adequate databases to research the prevalence and health impact of adverse drug reactions in elderly populations. Prescription information on elderly persons is not currently linked to diagnostic information or health outcomes data. For example, state Medicaid databases are used to reimburse pharmacies for prescriptions, therefore, the data on medication utilization are quite complete and accurate. However, diagnostic information for outpatient care is often incomplete or unavailable, and is not linked to pharmacy utilization databases.

Current changes underway in the health care delivery system may provide opportunities for new databases to be developed, although there are concerns that these changes may instead result in the loss of publicly available data. Trends of interest include the purchase of pharmacy benefit companies by pharmaceutical manufacturers and the increased use of managed care through proprietary health plans paid for by Medicaid and Medicare. Increased use of managed care to provide health care for the elderly offers opportunities for databases to be implemented that would link health outcomes (particularly adverse drug reactions) and prescription information, while paying close attention to patient confidentiality issues. However, these changes may instead be implemented to restructure datasets and require new levels of approval for data use or publishing. It is crucial that the larger issues involving potential censoring or loss of publicly available data on prescription drug use and health outcomes be addressed. The increased privatization of health care services for the elderly may lead to barriers to accessing datasets due to proprietary and competitive interests.

An area of interest to the committee is exploring the feasibility of developing a cooperative national data resource that would expand the researcher's

ability to examine population-based data rather than utilizing a piecemeal approach to data collection. This data resource could include information on diagnosis, medications prescribed, clinical interventions, health outcomes, and other relevant data. Of utmost importance would be maintaining patient confidentiality. This resource could be utilized as a repository to which individual researchers could submit peer-reviewed and approved research questions. Examining the feasibility of developing such a data resource would require the input of patients, health care providers, researchers, ethicists, and other interested persons and groups.

Dissemination of Information

Drug-related information can be complex, and information overload is a common phenomenon among health professionals and patients. Because information regarding drug use and interactions changes rapidly, information systems should be available to health care professionals that can provide up-to-date information that is unbiased, case specific, interactive, and readily accessible. In addition, it is important to develop diverse information dissemination strategies to effectively meet the needs of the heterogeneous elderly population. The information provided should be presented in a manner that can be understood by patients who cannot necessarily process complex information, yet need to make informed decisions and understand their options for treatment. Private- and public-sector initiatives are required to address this critical challenge. Health sciences centers that focus on training medical, nursing, and pharmacy students should be used to conduct independent, unbiased research and continuing education programs for practicing physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and the interested public (Woosley, 1994).

Capacity Building: Researchers and Clinicians

One of the major factors limiting the expansion of research in the area of geriatrics, and particularly geriatric pharmacology and clinical therapeutics, is the small number of health professionals entering this field. This is an area in which, as demographers can attest, the patient base is expanding and will continue to grow. Quality geriatric care depends on the development of multidisciplinary teams (including nursing, physical and occupational therapy, social work) to assess the concomitant problems and implement multiple interventions. However, reimbursements do not adequately cover the time required to handle the complexity of geriatric care. A recent report by the Alliance for Aging Research (1996) found that the United States has less than one fourth the number

of academic physician-scientists needed in geriatrics to teach and conduct research.

There is a pressing need to develop innovative approaches for recruiting and retaining researchers and clinicians. Programs are needed at many points along the career path, beginning early in the college and postbaccalaureate years to kindle an interest in the field of geriatrics and continuing throughout the professional years to retain the best investigators and clinicians available. Recruitment of minority investigators should be included within broader programs supporting young and mid-career investigators. The options available for approaching this issue include

1- to 2-year postbaccalaureate programs to provide research and clinical experience to young people considering a career in this field;

opportunities for medical, nursing, pharmacy, and other health professional students to have additional exposure to geriatric treatment and research during their education;

collaborative efforts between minority academic institutions and academic health sciences centers to encourage minority students to pursue a research program in this field;

loan-forgiveness programs to assist young researchers with high debt loads from health professional or graduate schools;

new sources of fellowships (e.g., through FDA, pharmaceutical companies, or insurance companies);

increased commitment to funding from fellowship training to first awards to independent grant support;

merit awards at the midcareer level and specialized sabbaticals to retrain midcareer professionals; and

retraining in research methodologies during sabbaticals for midcareer level geriatricians.

Currently there is only a limited understanding of the impact of aging on pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and drug interactions. Research is needed at the molecular, cellular, organ, system, and population levels for safer and more effective medications to be developed, delivered, and utilized by elderly persons. In addition, attention must be given to understanding and alleviating the disproportionate disease burden in elderly African-American and other minority populations.

The committee's major conclusions are summarized in Box 3.1 at the beginning of this chapter. The committee discussed and reflected only on the workshop presentations and acknowledges that there are numerous research

opportunities in geriatric pharmacology that need to be explored. Research in geriatric pharmacology and clinical therapeutics will require a commitment to fund studies that can further elucidate the relationship between pharmacokinetics and adverse drug interactions in the elderly and the complex individual variability of the aging process. Increasing the knowledge base will enable more effective therapeutic interventions and improved quality of life for the growing population of elderly persons.

Alliance for Aging Research. 1996. Will You Still Treat Me When I'm 65? The National Shortage of Geriatricians . Washington, DC: Alliance for Aging Research.

FDA (Food and Drug Administration). 1989. Guideline for the Study of Drugs Likely to Be Used in the Elderly. Rockville, MD: FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Woosley RL. 1994. Centers for education and research in therapeutics. Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics 56(6 Part 1):693–697.

Reports in the popular press about the increasing longevity of Americans and the aging of the baby boom generation are constant reminders that the American population is becoming older. Consequently, an issue of growing medical, health policy, and social concern is the appropriate and rational use of medications by the elderly.

Although becoming older does not necessarily correlate with increasing illness, aging is associated with anatomical and physiological changes that affect how medications are metabolized by the body. Furthermore, aging is often related to an increased frequency of chronic illness (often combined with multiple health problems) and an increased use of medications. Thus, a better understanding of the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of drugs; of the physiologic responses to those medications; as well as of the interactions among multiple medications is crucial for improving the health of older people.

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Directions for future research.

The goal of this report was to share a snapshot of parent leadership organizations across the U.S. In future analyses of the survey data, we can explore relationships, such as the relationship between funding and engagement of children. Additionally, we would like to research how organizations, funders, and parent leaders use, and would like to use, the Parent Power and Leadership Directory. For example, are organizations making connections with other organizations within their region and issue area? Are they making connections across regions and issue areas? If so, what is the nature and impact of these new connections? If not, what are the barriers and how can they be addressed? We are also further exploring how children benefit from their parents’ leadership through in-depth profiles of families engaged in leadership development across the U.S.

Focus group and interview participants raised several questions for future research that are better suited for in-depth qualitative methods. First, many participants asked for documentation of what a true partnership with parent leaders looks like. One parent leader shared how parent leaders are often brought into policy discussions after an agenda is already determined. A staff member remarked that often professionals “overcompensate because they don’t know what to do with parent leader groups and act patronizing.” Funders, in particular, were interested to know how parent leadership organizations wished to partner with them.

Second, participants wanted to know more about the process of parent leadership and organizing. A parent leader noted, “we talk a lot about what’s being done but there’s not a lot of direction of how to get it done,” for example, how to get attention from legislators and community leaders. Parent leaders also discussed the importance of not only documenting wins but also failures, how to recruit parent leaders and sustain their participation, what motivates and drives parent leaders, how to navigate internal conflict, and the different roles parent leaders can play.

Additional interests included: how organizations provide social and emotional supports for families, how parent leaders strengthen democracy, how gentrification influences parent leadership, challenges/tradeoffs for parent leaders who are at risk of burning out, and how organizations wish to partner with funders.

This landscape analysis illustrates the collective power of justice-oriented parent leadership organizations. There are parent leadership groups in every single state across  the U.S., as well as D.C. and Puerto Rico. They are spread across urban, suburban and rural areas, and they vary in size and scope from local neighborhood groups, to city-wide, to multi-county to statewide and national.

These organizations are mostly composed of, and often founded by, women. They are focused on issues of racial equity and social justice, especially in the K-12 and early childhood systems. Yet, parent leaders work on multiple issues that affect their lives, often in multi-racial settings. They share decision-making with staff, learn critical civic and political skills, and deepen their understanding of social justice, particularly racial justice.

They have accomplished major wins in legislation, policy, budgets, funding, juvenile justice, social benefits, mental health, and government operations. Most of the organizations engage children and youth in some way. Over one-third offer leadership development for young people, building intergenerational power.

We hope this report sparks partnerships among parent leaders, organization staff, government agencies, researchers, and the philanthropic community to ensure that parent leadership organizations gain more resources for racial justice; can engage the children of parent leaders, men, and LGBTQ+ communities; form and sustain coalitions and networks; increase their geographic diversity; and access more flexible funding. We also hope this report further motivates documenting how leadership and organizing can be holistically transformative for families and communities.

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Directions for Future Research

• First Online: 01 January 2012

Cite this chapter

• Kyung-Hyan Yoo 4 ,
• Ulrike Gretzel 5 &
• Markus Zanker 6  

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This chapter identifies research gaps based on the review of existing literature and provides concrete suggestions for future research. The need for new research methodologies and measurement approaches as well as the necessity to consider novel ways to interact with recommender systems, for instance through mobile devices, are outlined. In addition, ethical issues in regard to creating persuasive recommender systems are discussed.

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Communication Department, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, NJ, 07470, USA

Kyung-Hyan Yoo

Institute for Innovation in Business, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Australia

Ulrike Gretzel

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Yoo, KH., Gretzel, U., Zanker, M. (2013). Directions for Future Research. In: Persuasive Recommender Systems. SpringerBriefs in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4702-3_8

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