UCL School of Management is delighted to welcome Professor Sunkee Lee,to host a research seminar discussing ‘When Helping is Not Helpful: An Examination of the Negative Impact of Coworkers’ Help on One’s Experiential Learning’.

 

Abstract

This research proposes that coworker help—an organizational behavior often assumed to be beneficial—can have an unintended consequence: a negative effect on recipients’ learning trajectories. According to the experiential learning literature, task performance generally improves with cumulative experience. We first demonstrate this learning curve using daily-level panel data on 86 sales employees at a South Korean flash deal company over 2.5 years. However, we also theorize and find that receiving help—which, in our context, entails providing task solutions to the recipient—dampens this curve. This finding supports the idea that such help can deprive recipients of crucial opportunities for independent learning and may foster mislearning. Furthermore, we hypothesize and show that this negative moderating effect is amplified when individuals outperform their peers as a result of receiving help, consistent with the argument that such success can blind recipients to the need to further develop their own task capabilities. Overall, this study highlights the potential downsides of receiving help and its implications for organizations.