“You Don’t Want My Help?” The Negative and Positive Consequences of Help Offer Rejection

Helping is ubiquitous in organizations and vital to individual and organizational effectiveness. Yet, for various reasons, offers to help are sometimes rejected. Help offeror reactions to help offer rejection, or how employees respond to coworkers refusing their propositions to assist with work tasks, is an important but overlooked area of inquiry in organizational research. Although negative reactions to having help rejected might seem intuitive, help offer rejection may also produce positive outcomes for help offerors. Drawing upon sociometer and sensemaking theories, we present a theoretical model in which help offer rejection indirectly reduces subsequent helping through reduced organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) and indirectly increases subsequent creativity through enhanced sensemaking. We propose that the strength of these effects is moderated by coworkers’ explanation sensitivity such that coworkers’ sensitive and sincere communication reduces the negative effect on OBSE and enhances the positive effect on sensemaking. We test and find general support for this conceptual model in two multiwave, multisource field studies of full-time workers and in an experimental vignette study. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and suggest fruitful avenues for future research.