Why and when proactive helping does not lead to future help: The roles of psychological need satisfaction and interpersonal competence

Although the benefits of proactive helping (i.e., providing help without being asked) are recognized in the organizations, employees who proactively help others may not always engage in proactive helping in the future. To address this issue, we employed self-determination theory to explain why and when proactive helping promotes or inhibits subsequent proactive helping. Employing an experience sampling method, we collected data from 199 full-time employees and received 1483 daily responses (twice a day, across 10 days). We found that daily proactive helping is positively related to autonomy need satisfaction, while unrelated to competence and relatedness needs satisfaction. Moreover, when employees are high in perceived interpersonal competence, their proactive helping increases their autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs satisfaction. Finally, employees' daily proactive helping positively predicts subsequent proactive helping via enhanced senses of autonomy/competence and intrinsic motivation (next-day work engagement) when employees have great interpersonal competence. •Proactively helping satisfies autonomy, competence and relatedness needs when employees are high in interpersonal competence.•Proactively helping fails to satisfy relatedness need for employees with poor interpersonal competence.•Employee autonomy and competence needs satisfaction increases subsequent proactive helping via enhanced engagement.