ARTICLE of MANAGEMENT

Helping You Help Me: The Role of Diagnostic (In)Congruence in the Helping Process within Organizations

by Colin M. Fisher, Julianna Pillemer, and Teresa

 Key concepts include:

• Receivers of help must be assertively proactive in orienting givers to the project and helping givers understand the kind of help needed.
• Even when parties agree that an episode should be considered "helping," the boundaries of helping roles must still be negotiated in order to clarify what norms and behaviors are applicable.
• The timing of certain behaviors is an important determinant of how a helping episode will unfold. When help-givers and receivers quickly establish a mutual understanding of the project and what sort of help is needed, they are more likely to have a successful interaction.
• Both givers and receivers use two primary cues to understand the extent to which an episode is helpful: their perceptions of progress made during the episode and their emotions during the episode, which can be mutually reinforcing.
• The presence of negative emotion is sufficient to induce perceptions that a helping episode is unsuccessful even when instrumental progress occurs and/or the client is pleased with the outcome.
• To the extent that individuals perceive their prior experience with any particular helping episode to have been more or less successful, they will be more or less likely to engage in the discretionary behaviors of either seeking or giving help in the future.