I’ve written a few times recently about the benefits of both asking for help and giving help to others in the workplace. Yet despite these benefits, the act of asking for help can still be difficult, not least in cultures where doing so can be perceived as a sign of weakness.
Recent research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explores the various types of help-seeking in the workplace, and how they can be activated.
Seeking help
For instance, if people seek help with the aim of achieving competence and mastery of a task, this tends to be perceived positively by others, and especially by one’s supervisors. If, however, people seek help to bail them out of a crisis and have their problem solved immediately, this tends to be viewed negatively, and the competency of the individual cast into doubt.
“Metaphorically, what distinguishes these two types of help-seeking is the difference between asking someone to teach you how to fish versus just asking them for fish,” the researchers say.
“When you engage in autonomous help-seeking to solve a problem at work, it brings more potential benefits to you as a member of an organization, foremost of which is that you are likely to learn about the principles and ‘know-how’ of the problem,” they continue. “Beyond the actual learning, autonomous help-seeking also signals to your co-workers about your independence and genuine interest in learning and developing long-term skills, all of which helps cultivate a more positive reputation and professional image among your co-workers.”
Types of help
The researchers identified the two types of help most commonly used in the workplace along with the context those types of help are typically involved in. For instance, they identified challenge stressors, which are typically associated with an opportunity to learn and grow, and hindrance stressors, which tend to exist as impediments to achieving one’s goals and can include ambiguity, office politics, and red tape.
The workplace tends to create various coping mechanisms in response to these stressors, which results in employees looking for help in different ways. For instance, challenge stressors usually result in autonomous help being sought, whereas hindrance stressors see an increase in more dependent help-seeking.
“Problematic work situations that encourage or enhance a motivation to learn push employees to seek more autonomous help,” the researchers say. “Hindrance stressors, on the other hand, really demotivate employees from learning and developing long-term work skills and instead make them prioritize getting the task in front of them done and the problem quickly fixed, which likely serves to increase their dependent help-seeking.”
The researchers believe that a key takeaway is that often it is the circumstances the employee finds themselves in that drives the type of help they look for, with the nature of work stressors we’re dealing with a key factor.
“Because of the clear links we observed between the different type of work stressors and different types of help-seeking, employees should be encouraged to identify workplace factors that may either constrain or foster the occurrence of autonomous or dependent help-seeking. That way, they can properly prepare when those factors arise,” they explain. “For example, employees can rely on job-crafting techniques to create their preferred work conditions, such as strategically creating manageable time pressure and removing any hindrance factors such as work boundaries, as well as preemptively seeking clarifications on work task expectations.”
For managers, the authors suggest the key is to try and create an environment whereby asking for autonomous help that “teaches us how to fish” is the best approach so that employees can feel encouraged to improve their knowledge with the help of others.
“Managers can communicate to employees about having a learning-oriented organizational culture and create incentives for them to engage in learning-oriented developmental activities,” they conclude. “They can also encourage their workers to designate some portion of their work week to learning from one another—even if this comes at the cost of slightly less productivity—as long as doing so won’t hurt the on-time delivery of their work outputs.”
