Doing good, feeling good? The roles of helping motivation and citizenship pressure

Abstract

Drawing on self-determination theory, this research investigates whether the motivation behind employees’ helping behaviors is associated with their positive affect and their subsequent help provision, and whether citizenship pressure moderates these relationships. A recall-based experiment and an experience-sampling study capturing helping episodes among fulltime employees found that when employees helped coworkers because of higher autonomous (controlled) motivation in a helping episode, they experienced higher (lower) positive affect, and they had stronger (weaker) helping intentions and helped coworkers more (less) subsequently. We further found that citizenship pressure enhanced the positive relationship between episodic autonomous motivation and positive affect. Overall, the results challenge the universality of the “doing good–feeling good” effect and explicate the joint roles of citizenship pressure and helpers’ episodic motivation in influencing employees’ positive affect and their subsequent helping behaviors.