Abstract
BACKGROUND: Employees frequently do not engage in help-seeking due to the associated social costs. Despite the importance of help-seeking, little research has been done to explore factors affecting whether individuals will or will not engage in help-seeking at work, and existing research has thus far not addressed help seeking in the telework context.
OBJECTIVE: This paper expands the current literature on help-seeking by exploring this behavior in the context of teleworkers and develops propositions regarding how aspects of virtual work environments will help determine teleworkers' willingness to engage in help-seeking behavior.
METHODS: This article presents a review with critical analysis and integration of selected telework and help-seeking literatures.
Results: Grounded in the literature on inequity/indebtedness and the literature on threats to self-esteem, theoretically-derived research propositions are developed that help shed insights into help seeking behaviors in the telework context. These research propositions encompass media presence and the teleworker's perceived opportunity for reciprocation, and their associated impacts on the perceived cost of seeking help.
CONCLUSION: The proposed research propositions provide practitioners and researchers a means to be better able to assess telework applications and prevent unintended effects. Through such systematic understanding of how telework alters the perceived cost of seeking help and the teleworker's willingness to seek help, telework may be further improved to contribute to more effective and productive individuals and organizations.