The Effect of Performance Pressure on Helping Behavior: Mediating Role of Workplace Anxiety and Moderating Effect of Agreeableness ()
1. Introduction
With the continuous progress of the economy and society, the development of enterprises is accompanied by higher performance requirements and more challenging work tasks within the organization. Individual employees in the organization are also faced with higher performance requirements, and the resulting performance pressure has also caused more negative effects. The previous research found that performance pressure will lead to the generation of individual self-destruction, resulting in pro-organizational unethical behavior of employees (Li et al., 2018: p. 358) . This means that employees with high performance pressure are likely to ignore the ethics in work. How to deal with the situation when colleagues seek help under such circumstances? As a kind of pro-social behavior, helping behavior is closely related to the ideology and morality of the giver. Helping behavior in the organization is very important to the development of the organization. It can not only give full play to the skills and expertise of each employee, but also enhance the cohesion of the team (Xiao & Zhang, 2020: p. 27) . Moderate helping behavior will have a positive impact on the career growth of employees, team efficiency and team vitality (Podsakoff et al., 1997: p. 262) .
So how does performance pressure in the workplace affect helping behavior? How can business managers improve employee’s helping behavior from the perspective of performance pressure? According to these questions, this paper introduces workplace anxiety as a mediating effect and agreeableness as a moderating effect to analyze and discuss. When employees find it difficult to achieve the performance goals set by the organization, performance pressure will occur, followed by workplace anxiety, which will have an impact on employees’ helping behavior. However, when individuals face workplace anxiety, their attitude towards helping others will change according to their personality traits. Some studies show that employees’ prosocial behavior is affected by their personality traits (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987: p. 91) . Agreeableness reflects the motivation of individuals to maintain harmonious interpersonal relationships. Compared with low-agreeableness individuals, high-agreeableness individuals pay more attention to actively maintaining friendly relations and cooperative atmosphere between teams (Ehrhart & Naumann, 2004: p. 960) , and are more willing to implement helping others. From this point of view, it is speculated that agreeableness may regulate the relationship between workplace anxiety and helping behavior, and then play a role in the process of performance pressure affecting helping behavior.
To sum up, based on the theory of ego depletion, this paper discusses the process of the influence of performance pressure on helping behavior through workplace anxiety at the individual level of employees, and takes agreeableness as the regulatory effect, with a view to enriching relevant theoretical research and putting forward suggestions for organizations and managers to effectively improve their helping behavior in practice.
2. Literature Review and Hypotheses
2.1. The Theory of Ego Depletion
Ego depletion refers to the decline of the individual’s ability or willingness to act in the process of controlling the environment and themselves (Baumeister et al., 1998: p. 1252) . Ego depletion theory is reflected in the limited psychological energy of individuals, which is constantly consumed in the process of controlling their thoughts, feelings and behaviors to support the realization of self-execution function (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000: pp. 247-259) . When carrying out activities that require self-control, excessive use of limited psychological energy will lead to ego depletion, which will limit the self-control ability of individuals in the face of subsequent behaviors (Rachman, 2012: p. 502) . Research shows that the inhibitory voice requires the speaker to be highly alert to the problems in the work, which causes the speaker’s personal loss and hinders their destructive voice behavior (Lin, Ma, & Johnson, 2016: p. 815) . It embodies a core principle of the theory of ego depletion: the loss caused by the efforts of self-control in the early stage will inhibit people’s self-control ability in subsequent tasks (Malhotra, Ku, & Murniuhan, 2008: p. 78) .
2.2. Performance Pressure and Helping Behavior
Performance pressure is a kind of pressure source with short time and rich connotation. It has been defined as the gap between the performance prediction results recognized by the organization and the potential performance of the organization (Matsumoto, 2002: p. 285) . Researcher believes that performance pressure is a collection of interrelated factors that can enhance the team to produce good output (Gardner, 2012: p. 46) . Performance pressure is different from other external pressures. External pressures include time pressure, crisis pressure, etc., such as completing tasks within the specified time and being forced to make adjustments after encountering a crisis. Performance pressure reflects performance (Durhamd & Locke, 2000: p. 115) , which indicates some physiological and psychological reactions when employees perceive that their abilities and requirements do not match when facing performance tasks. Research shows that feeling performance pressure will promote self-regulation exhaustion through stress assessment and self-regulation, and then affect employees’ later actions (Mitchell et al., 2019: p. 531) . This paper speculates that employees’ ego depletion caused by performance pressure will cause their own cognitive and emotional changes, and further affect employees’ helping behavior.
The act of helping others was initially defined as the act of providing help to others without seeking return. Research shows incorporated helping behavior into organizational citizenship behavior and defined helping behavior as voluntary helping others predict or solve problems in advance (Podsakoff et al., 2000: p. 533) . With the continuous development of research on organizational citizenship behavior, scholars differentiated organizational citizenship behavior and began to carry out targeted research on helping behavior, and more carefully investigated the generation and impact of helping behavior. For example, helping behavior is defined as the behavior in that employees spend their time and energy to support others’ work tasks for free (Bamberger, 2009: p. 49) . It is defined that employees in the organization voluntarily provide work information and resources for colleagues and share work tasks in other ways. The existing research mainly explores the antecedents and effects of responsible leadership, ethical leadership and other leadership behaviors, individual emotion, team atmosphere, personal characteristics (Konovsky & Organ, 1996: p. 253) , and other behaviors; but at present, the impact mechanism of performance pressure on helping behaviors has not been studied.
Because employees facing performance pressure think that high performance is necessary, they will stimulate their motivation for achievement and think that performance will be linked to their organizational status. In order to complete the performance tasks, set by the organization, employees will consume individual limited energy in the process of completing. At this time, employees mainly focus on completing the tasks assigned to them by the organization within the specified time. The resulting ego depletion inhibits the individual’s will and energy to help others in the later stage. At the same time, the increase of performance pressure will lead to the generation of employees’ negative emotions. Employees need to allocate some energy to regulate their negative emotions while completing their work tasks. In the process of dealing with such emotions, it is easy to ignore the consideration of moral aspects, thus reducing the generation of employees’ helping behaviors.
H1: Performance pressure negatively affects employees’ helping behavior.
2.3. The Mediating Role of Workplace Anxiety
Ego depletion theory emphasizes that the loss caused by self-control in the early stage will lead to the decline of self-control ability of employees in subsequent work tasks. Previous studies have shown that the organization’s high-performance requirements for employees have brought performance pressure and anxiety to employees. Employees have performance pressure to achieve performance goals, while individuals have only limited resources to regulate adverse emotional reactions. In the face of performance pressure, employees have to control their own activities, which will lead to the consumption of psychological energy. In the state of self-consumption, the self-control ability of follow-up behavior is limited, and the negative impact of performance pressure on individuals cannot be completely consumed, resulting in workplace anxiety and anxiety. If employees have sustained negative emotions in the work environment, the lack of individual control ability may lead to resource exhaustion and anxiety (Baumeister et al., 1998: p. 1252) . To sum up, the following assumptions are proposed:
H2: Performance pressure positively affects workplace anxiety.
Workplace anxiety will affect individual behavior. Research has pointed out that the negative emotion of employees will reduce the helping behavior in the workplace (Liu et al., 2020: p. 362) . After the occurrence of workplace anxiety, the psychological and physical resources will be mobilized for self-defense to avoid danger. This self-psychological adjustment will further consume personal adjustment resources. Since helping behavior is a behavior involving interpersonal communication, its social nature determines that the implementer of helping behavior needs a lot of energy of self-control. This means that implementing helping behavior requires more time and energy for effective role behavior and social relationship management, so the generation of workplace anxiety is not conducive to the implementation of helping behavior by employees.
Therefore, this study believes that performance pressure will lead to workplace anxiety. In order to alleviate the impact of performance pressure from anxiety, individuals will reduce the frequency of helping others at work. To sum up, the following assumptions are proposed:
H3: Workplace anxiety negatively affects helping behavior.
H4: Workplace anxiety plays an intermediary role between performance pressure and helping behavior.
2.4. The Moderating Role of Agreeableness
As a basic personality trait, agreeableness is altruistic, and high-agreeableness individuals have higher empathy and forgiveness abilities. At the same time, they pay more attention to teamwork and interpersonal harmony, and focus more on the interests of others in interpersonal relationships. In the face of complex work tasks, individuals who can better deal with individual performance pressure and interpersonal relationships in the team (Moberg, 2001: p. 47) are willing to interact with other people, and usually show pro-social orientation (Martin, Kell, & Motowidlo, 2016: p. 41) . Therefore, in the face of performance pressure and workplace anxiety, employees with high agreeableness are more willing to implement helping behavior.
Specifically, in the face of performance pressure and workplace anxiety, high-agreeableness employees will give priority to the overall interests of themselves and team members, and are more willing to provide help to colleagues who in difficulties, in order to maintain a good interpersonal relationship, and reduce the negative impact of performance pressure and workplace anxiety on team internal cooperation (Beersma & De Dreu, 2002: p. 227) . On the contrary, low-agreeableness employees tend to be self-centered (Jesen & Graziano, 2001: p. 323) , and are more likely to refuse to help others when facing their own performance requirements and anxiety. To sum up, the following assumptions are proposed:
H5: Agreeableness regulates the relationship between workplace anxiety and helping behavior. The negative relationship between workplace anxiety and helping behavior is weak for high-agreeableness and is stronger for low-agreeableness employees.
The model to be studied in this paper is shown in Figure 1.
3. Methodology
The research samples of this study mainly come from the employees of 10 enterprises in Xi’an, Taiyuanand Yangzhou, No. 1 and No. 2 are two financial institutions in Xi’an, No. 3 to No. 5 are information technology enterprises in Xi’an, No. 6 to No. 8 are three educational institutions in Taiyuan, No. 9 is a
manufacturing enterprise in Yangzhou, and No. 10 is a real estate enterprise in Yangzhou. Due to the epidemic situation, data collection is mainly online. We first communicated with the managers of the enterprisesto check the reliability of the data, explained the research purpose, research sample requirements and questionnaire content, and then sent the questionnaire to the participants in the form of an electronic link. The purpose of the study and the random reward after answering the questions are explained again at the beginning of the electronic questionnaire to ensure the effectiveness of online data. At the same time, to avoid the effect of the deviation of the general method on the measurement results as far as possible, the questionnaire survey of this study is divided into two times: 151 and 140 questionnaires are recovered, respectively. Finally, this study is based on 261 valid questionnaires (the effective recovery rate is 89.7%). The sample consisted of 57.3% female employees. 49% of the samples were aged between 20 and 30.Over 85.6%of the sample graduated from university. 39.5% of the respondents had working with their immediate superiors for more than 3 years. 33.1% of the sample had up to 5 years of work experience. Table 1 shows the specific demographic information in this survey.
Performance pressure was used by 7 items (α = 0.970) translated by Yang (Yang, 2004: p. 62) . Workplace anxiety has used the scale to measure by Mccarthy (McCarthy, Trougakos, & Cheng, 2016: p. 279) , including 8 items (α = 0.960). Agreeableness was used by 4 items (α = 0.938) developed by domestic scholars Zhu (Zhu, 2012: p. 120) . Helping behavior was used by 7 items (α = 0.954) developed by Podsakoff (Podsakoff, Ahearne, & Mackenzie, 1997: p. 262) . All of the scales were used a five-point scale from “1” to “5” which meansfrom “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”.
Control variables Previous studies suggested that gender, age, education level, working years and working time with immediate superior.
4. Data Analysis
4.1. Discriminant Validity
The AVE has to be greater than 0.50 (between 0.553 to 0.756), the result verified the exploratory factor analysis. To confirm whether factor specification matches the actual data, AMOS 23.0 is used to verify confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). By comparing one-factor (Performance pressure, workplace anxiety, agreeableness and helping behavior as one factor) with four-factor models (Performance pressure, workplace anxiety, agreeableness and helping behavior as four separate
Note(s): N = 261.
factors). The results showed that the four-factor model (χ2/df = 1.894, RMSEA = 0.053. CFI = 0.905. TLI = 0.902. IFI = 0.906) provided allowable models that are more consistent with the data than the one-factor model (χ2/df = 5.725, RMSEA = 0.063. CFI = 0.710. TLI = 0.700. IFI = 0.711). As a result, the structure of the assumption factor was examined.
4.2. Descriptive Statistics and Correlations
The data were analyzed by mean value, standard deviation and correlation coefficient between variables, as the results shown in Table 2. It can be seen that performance pressure show a positive relationship with workplace anxiety (β = 0.68, p < 0.01), and a negative relationship with agreeableness (β = −0.15, p < 0.05) and helping behavior (β = −0.35, p < 0.01), which provisionally support the relevant assumptions of this investigation. The results are shown in Table 2.
4.3. Hypotheses Testing
In order to test our hypotheses, hierarchical regression analysesare the first method we used, and the results are shown in Table 3. The control variables were put in model 1 and model 3 firstly, and then the independent variable was put in model 2 and model 4. According to the data in Table 3, the regression coefficient of performance pressure on helping behavior is significant (β = −0.34, t = 5.47, p < 0.01). After adding control variables, performance pressure and helping behavior have a significant negative impact. Hypothesis 1 is tested.
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Table 2. Results of correlation analysis.
Note(s): N = 261, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.
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Table 3. Results of intermediary effect.
Note(s): N = 261, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.
The hierarchical regression method in SPSS24.0 was used to verify the intermediary role of workplace anxiety between performance stress and helping behavior. The verification of intermediary effect includes the following steps: first, determine the impact of performance pressure on helping behavior, which has been verified in hypothesis 1; the second is the effect of performance stress on workplace anxiety. According to Table 3, Model 1 tests the effect of control variables on workplace anxiety. Model 2 adds performance pressure on the basis of Model 1, and the regression coefficient of workplace anxiety is significant (β = 0.87, t = 24.93, p < 0.01), indicating that performance pressure has a significant positive impact on workplace anxiety. Therefore, hypothesis 2 is tested. Adding control variables and intermediary variables into model 5, workplace anxiety has a significant negative impact on employee helping behavior (β = −0.38, t = −6.17, p < 0.01), and hypothesis 3 is tested. Model 6 regressed the control variables, performance pressure and workplace anxiety on helping behavior, and found that workplace anxiety had a significant negative impact on helping behavior (β = −0.33, t =− 2.7, p < 0.05). At this time, the effect of performance pressure on helping behavior changed from −0.30 to −0.06, and the negative impact of performance pressure on helping behavior decreased, indicating that workplace anxiety has a mediating effect between performance pressure and helping behavior. Therefore, hypothesis 4 is tested.
From model 3 in Table 4, we can see that the interaction between workplace anxiety and agreeableness has a significant positive impact on helping behavior (β = 0.14, p < 0.05), this shows that the higher agreeableness, the weaker the negative impact of workplace anxiety on helping behavior. Hypothesis 5 is tested.
The Bootstrap in PROCESS was used to carry out 5000 return sampling. The results show the low agreeableness is −1 standard deviation, and the highly agreeableness is +1 standard deviation. When the agreeableness is high, the relationship between workplace anxiety and helping behavior is weak (b = −0.19,95% unbiased confidence interval is [−0.3476, −0.0503], excluding 0; When appropriate agreeableness is low, workplace anxiety has a significant relationship with helping behavior (b = −0.30, 95% unbiased confidence interval is [−0.4978, −0.1563], excluding 0, indicating that appropriate agreeableness positively regulates the negative relationship between workplace anxiety and helping behavior. When agreeableness is high, the negative relationship decreases, and when agreeableness is low, the negative relationship increases. Hypothesis 5 is further tested.
5. Discussion and Implications
Based on previous empirical findings, performance pressure can reduce the helpfulness of employees, and indirectly affect the employees’ helping behavior by influencing workplace anxiety. In general, this paper enriches the research on performance pressure and helping behavior. According to the above data results, the specific discussion is as follows:
Performance pressure has a negative impact on employee helping behavior.
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Table 4. Results of moderating effect.
Note(s): N = 261, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.
When employees feel the pressure of performance and start to self-regulate, they will consume resources and cause self-loss. Resource exhaustion has an impact on the individual’s self-regulation ability, which makes the individual lack the necessary resources to implement the helping behavior. Previous studies have also confirmed that performance pressure can lead to individual negative behavior, but no research has focused on the impact of performance pressure on employee helping behavior. Based on previous studies, this study enriches the study of the “negative side” of the impact of performance pressure.
Workplace anxiety plays an intermediary role between performance pressure and helping behavior. Part of the impact of performance pressure on employees’ helping behavior is realized by influencing workplace anxiety. According to the theory of ego depletion, when employees perceive performance pressure, they need to consume individual psychological and physiological resources for adjustment. When the individual’s ability to adjust is damaged, anxiety will occur. Anxious individuals will reduce the implementation of helping others under the condition of ego depletion.
Agreeableness positively regulates the relationship between workplace anxiety and helping behavior, as well as the indirect relationship between performance pressure and helping behavior through workplace anxiety. The conclusion of this paper shows that agreeableness will affect employees’ self-destruction status and alleviate the negative impact of employees’ workplace anxiety on helping others.
5.1. Theoretical Implications
It explores the relationship and influence mechanism between performance pressure and helping behavior, and enriches the research on the results of performance pressure. This paper focuses on performance pressure and its impact on helping behavior. From the perspective of research status, the current research on performance pressure is relatively rich, including workplace cheating, pro-organizational unethical behavior, and the impact on employee engagement. These studies have pointed out that performance pressure can cause employees to make negative behavior in the workplace, but there is no empirical test on the relationship between performance pressure and helping behavior. This study not only describes the impact of performance pressure on employees’ negative emotions (workplace anxiety) in the workplace, but also reveals its impact on helping behavior, enriching the research on performance pressure.
The research is based on the theory of ego depletion, and explains the employee’s helping behavior from a new theoretical perspective. In the past, the generation mechanism of helping behavior mostly focused on social exchange theory and role theory. Based on the theory of ego depletion, starting from the ego depletion caused by the limitation of individual resources, this paper introduces workplace anxiety as the intermediary effect and pleasant as the regulatory effect, and explains the mechanism of performance pressure on employee helping behavior.
5.2. Practical Implications
Formulate reasonable performance objectives for employees and appropriately reduce their performance pressure. According to the research results, employee performance pressure will negatively affect employees’ helping behavior, so leaders should arrange reasonable and challenging performance goals for employees according to their individual work ability to reduce the possibility of employees’ performance pressure. Not only that, managers can help employees better achieve their performance goals by providing resources, and can hold regular meetings to discuss, exchange experience, and share problem-solving methods; at the same time, grass-roots managers should always pay attention to the work progress of employees, and intervene to help them solve problems, which will improve the possibility of employees’ helping others.
Pay attention to whether employees have workplace anxiety, and timely help them with psychological relief. The results show that performance pressure cause anxiety easily, resulting in the inability of employees to implement helping behavior, which will have a negative impact on the working atmosphere and team cooperation of enterprises. At the same time, for individual employees, long-term anxiety may cause immeasurable harm to their physical and mental health. Therefore, the organization should pay attention to the workplace anxiety of employees and conduct effective psychological counseling through various forms; at the same time, the organization can also provide appropriate training for employees to improve their work ability and help them to achieve performance objectives efficiently; provide places for employees to relieve anxiety, such as psychological counseling room, catharsis room, etc. Thus, alleviating the impact of workplace anxiety on employees’ negative behaviors will not only improve their ability to withstand pressure, but also have a positive effect on employees’ helping behaviors in the organization.
5.3. Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research
The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of performance pressure on employee helping behavior. Influenced by the researcher’s personal ability and level, there are many deficiencies in the research process.
The theoretical model needs to be optimized, and the discussion of the impact mechanism is insufficient. Future research can discuss new impact factors. This study does not add comfortableness to the model, and the personality traits of employees will also affect the helping behavior of employees when they face performance pressure to a certain extent, which can be used as a moderator for future research.
This paper uses workplace anxiety as an intermediary variable. There may be other intermediary variables between performance pressure and employee helping behavior. In the future, we can find new intermediary variables from other perspectives to enrich the study of performance pressure. In addition, we can also discuss the employee’s helping behavior at the individual and organizational levels. The individual’s behavior will be affected by the organizational social situation, work task characteristics, and so on. In future research, we can start with the interaction between the organizational situation and individual characteristics, and carry out more in-depth research.
The sample source is limited. The data obtained from this questionnaire are mainly from Shaanxi, Shanxi and other provinces, and the research samples are relatively concentrated. In the future, the sample base can be expanded to make it more representative of the population distribution.
Horizontal data has certain limitations on the causal relationship between research variables, and longitudinal research can be carried out in the future to make the results more convincing. Because performance pressure is persistent, the perceived performance pressure of individuals will cause emotional, psychological and physical loss, and if it lasts too long, it may cause psychological and physical discomfort. Since this impact is a long-term process, more accurate methods can be used for longitudinal research in the future.