Helping your coworkers could be making you worse at your job

A worker helps a colleague.
Image: REUTERS/Tony Gentile
Stay up to date:
Future of Work
Helping your coworkers too often can lead to mental and emotional exhaustion and may even hurt your job performance, a new study suggests.
These depletion effects are especially strong for employees with high “pro-social motivation”—those who care deeply about the welfare of others.
While previous research on helping has focused largely on the effects of the beneficiaries, this is one of the first studies to focus on the helpers.
“Helping co-workers can be draining for the helpers, especially for employees who help a lot,” says Russell Johnson, associate professor of management at Michigan State University. “Somewhat ironically, the draining effects of helping are worse for employees who have high pro-social motivation. When these folks are asked for help, they feel a strong obligation to provide help, which can be especially taxing.”
For a new study, 68 employees in a variety of industries, including finance, engineering, and health care, filled out surveys in the morning and afternoon for 15 consecutive workdays. The surveys measured depletion using a previously established scientific scale and helping through another scale that asks questions such as “Today, I went out of my way to help co-workers who asked for my help with work-related problems.”
The findings, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, suggest employees should exercise caution when agreeing to help because helping may leave them depleted and less effective at work. On days when employees find themselves engaging in unusually high amounts of helping, a strategic use of breaks, naps, and stimulants like caffeine may be a way to bolster energy.
Help-seekers, on the other hand, should realize that asking for help, especially multiples times a day, has detrimental effects on the employees who are helping.
“This is not to say that coworkers should avoid seeking help, but that they ought to consider the magnitude and solvability of the issue before doing so and avoid continually seeking help from the same person,” the study says.
On the bright side, thanking helpers are making them aware of the positive results of their actions, can minimize and even reverse the effects of depletion. “Thus, help-seekers can reduce the burden they place on helpers by clearly expressing the positive impact that helping had on them,” the authors write.
Other researchers from Michigan State and from the University of Florida are coauthors of the study.
Don't miss any update on this topic
Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.
License and Republishing
World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
Related topics:
Forum Stories newsletter
Bringing you weekly curated insights and analysis on the global issues that matter.
More on LeadershipSee all
Marieke Blom
February 21, 2025
Jan Oliver Schwarz and Katharina Kleine
February 18, 2025
Madeleine North
January 28, 2025