EMOTION HELPERS: THE ROLE OF HIGH POSITIVE AFFECTIVITY AND HIGH SELF-MONITORING MANAGERS

Who provides help to employees suffering anxiety and emotional pain in organizations? From an interactionist perspective, we anticipated that increasing levels of managerial responsibility would unlock discretionary helping behavior related to differences in self-monitoring and positive affectivity. Results from a study of 94 members of a recruitment firm confirmed that those active in providing emotional help to others in the workplace tended to possess a combination of managerial responsibility and a high self-monitoring or high positive affectivity disposition. By contrast, when members were low in positive affect or self-monitoring they provided less emotional help to others, irrespective of the level of managerial responsibility. These interaction results remained significant after taking into account centrality in friendship and workflow networks, as well as significant effects of gender.