Help Comes from Understanding: The Positive Effect of Communication Visibility on Employee Helping Behavior

Abstract

Extant research focuses on the antecedents of employee helping behavior, but the role of social technologies in enhancing employee helping behavior remains understudied. The purpose of our research is to investigate the relationship between communication visibility and employee helping behavior. Drawing on both communication visibility theory and social cognitive theory, we propose that the association between communication visibility and helping behavior is mediated by employee psychological state assessed by a cognitive state variable: trust in coworkers. Further, we also propose that proactive personality moderates the positive effect of trust in coworkers on employee helping behavior. We examined our hypothesized relationships using 149 employees collected in a field experiment in China. As hypothesized, we find that trust in coworkers mediates the relationship between communication visibility and helping behavior. Moreover, proactive personality strengthens the effectiveness of communication visibility. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research and practice.

Excessive Enterprise Social Media Use Behavior at Work: Role of Communication Visibility and Perspective of Uses and Gratifications Theory

“…For instance, some scholars have shown that increased communication visibility can improve employees' meta-knowledge about "who knows whom" and "who knows what" [19] and further promote the formation of new ways of working within the organization [62]. Liang, et al [24] demonstrated that communication visibility of ESM has a positive impact on employees' helping behavior within an organization by building trust among them. Sun, et al [71] explored the relationship between ESM visibility and the process of an individual's vicarious learning through a confirmatory case study and found that communication visibility can promote users' attention process and retention process.…”

“…Ellison, et al [69] state that accessing personal information helps employees develop social relationships in the workplace. Viewing the messages of colleagues contributes to employees' learning more about their colleagues' interests and activities and enable linkages between them and likeminded colleagues [6,24]. This helps to not only enhance employees' understanding of other colleagues but also build closer and more trusting relationships with their colleagues [84], thereby improving employees' perception of social value.…”

“…Besides, based on work needs, employees may need to obtain a lot of professional information to help them complete their work. Message transparency provides employees with clues to develop their awareness of what other colleagues know [6,19], which enables employees to quickly locate and obtain work-related professional information and expertise [24,85]. The acquisition of such information provides the potential to meet the content needs of employees, thereby helping to improve employees' perceived information value.…”

“…Some scholars regard visibility as the root affordance, which is the basis for the existence of other affordances [23]. Furthermore, Liang, et al [24] indicate that communication visibility captures the propensity of users to use technology. However, although communication visibility has been well explicated by emerging theories for its intuitive meaning, it has rarely been empirically tested [6].…”

An Empirical Study of the Effect of Communication Visibility on Innovation Behavior

“…Engelbrecht et al (2019) posited that network transparency implies apparent social networks. Knowing the structure of others’ social networks may provide signals of trust and credibility (Chen et al, 2020b; Liang et al, 2020; Walther et al, 2009). Therefore, network translucence facilitates cultivating a good interpersonal relationship climate.…”