To Ask or Not to Ask: The Effects of Broadly and Narrowly Adopted Peer-Recognition Systems on Help Seeking

Many companies now use peer-recognition systems that allow employees to publicly recognize their peers for positive behaviors. Practitioners have touted the potential for these systems to increase helping among employees. However, the extent to which employees actually use these systems to recognize their peers varies across organizations; some are used broadly by many employees across all functional, specialty, geographic, and hierarchical subgroups of the organization, whereas others are only narrowly used by some, but not all, subgroups. Across three experiments, we examine how peer-recognition systems impact employees’ propensity to ask others for help (i.e., help seeking) based on whether the system is broadly used by all subgroups or only narrowly used by specific subgroups. We predict and find that a peer-recognition system broadly used by all subgroups strengthens employees’ perception of a help-seeking norm. This perception increases employees’ propensity to seek help directly through norm conformity and indirectly by reducing the perceived psychological costs of help seeking. We also predict and find that the effect of peer-recognition systems that are narrowly used by specific subgroups is moderated by whether employees belong to the subgroups using the system; whereas it increases help-seeking propensity for members of the subgroups using the system, it decreases help-seeking propensity for nonmembers relative to when there is no peer-recognition system. Our theory and results suggest that peer-recognition systems can increase help seeking, but these same systems could decrease help seeking for employees belonging to subgroups that do not use the system.