Empathy Gaps Between Helpers and Help-Seekers: Implications for Cooperation

Help-seekers and potential helpers often experience an “empathy gap” – an inability to understand each other’s unique perspectives. Both parties are concerned about their reputation, self-esteem, and relationships, but these concerns differ in ways that lead to misinterpretation of the other party’s actions, and, in turn, missed opportunities for cooperation. In this article, we review research that describes the role-specific concerns of helpers and help-seekers. We then review studies of emotional perspective-taking, which can help explain why help-seekers and helpers often experience empathy gaps. We go on to discuss recent work that illustrates the consequences of empathy gaps between helpers and help-seekers—social prediction errors that prevent helping and misguided intentions that can lead to unhelpful help. Finally, we discuss some promising directions for future research

THE ROLE OF INTERDEPENDENCE IN THE MICRO-FOUNDATIONS OF ORGANIZATION DESIGN: TASK, GOAL, AND KNOWLEDGE INTERDEPENDENCE

Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the organization design process. In this context, task interdependence was rightly assumed to be exogenously determined by characteristics of the work and the technology. We no longer live in that world, yet our view of interdependence has remained exceedingly task-centric and our treatment of interdependence overly deterministic. As organizations face increasingly unpredictable workstreams and workers co-design the organization alongside managers, our field requires a more comprehensive toolbox that incorporates aspects of agent-based interdependence. In this paper, we synthesize research in organization design, organizational behavior, and other related literatures to examine three types of interdependence that characterize organizations’ workflows: task, goal, and knowledge interdependence. We offer clear definitions for each construct, analyze how each arises endogenously in the design process, explore their interrelations, and pose questions to guide future research

Overcoming the Help-Seeker’s Dilemma: How Computer-Mediated Systems Encourage Employee Help-Seeking Initiation

Helping processes are critical for organizations. Yet, research suggests that there are strong disincentives for employees to seek help from others. Drawing on self-presentation theory, this paper tested how computer-mediated communication may be used to stimulate a help-seeking response from workers. Subjects were placed in an induced-failure work scenario and provided with a computer-mediated channel with which to request help. By experimentally manipulating feedback, anonymity, and interdependence features of the work context, we then measured the length of time before subjects requested help. Eighty three percent of subjects initiated a request for help within the work period, and these help-seeking requests were made more quickly under strong helping norms, high goal interdependence, and high anonymity conditions rather than weak helping norms, low goal interdependence, and low anonymity conditions. The results provide new insights into the design of official communication channels intended to encourage employee help-seeking