The Impact of Leader and Peers on Newcomers Coworker Helping Trends

Although researchers have studied coworker helping and other forms of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) extensively, we still know little about the emergence and development of such behavior over time. Drawing from and extending Methot, Lepak, Shipp, & Boswell's temporal theory of citizenship behavior (2016), the current study posits and tests hypotheses regarding the prevalence of alternative helping trends, and the impact of leadership style (i.e., abusive supervision) and normative context (i.e., coworker helping norms) on the likelihood of manifesting one or another of these trends as well as on the nature of these trends themselves. Using longitudinal, multi-source data from a sample of 249 newcomers to 34 units in a Chinese call center, we find that the vast majority of newcomers maintain a stable pattern of peer helping in their first four months on the job, with no evidence of an upward trend. Consistent with our hypotheses, we also find the likelihood of evidencing a downward trend in pee...