When you try your best to help but don't succeed: How self-compassionate reflection influences reactions to interpersonal helping failures

Abstract

In this research, we explore how employees’ self-reflections following a failed attempt to help a coworker shape future helping intentions and behaviors. Specifically, we propose a dual-process model of parallel affective and cognitive pathways to delineate how, and why, reflecting on an interpersonal helping failure with self-compassion would result in countervailing effects on future helping. Whereas self-compassion reduces employees’ future helping via the alleviation of guilt (affective mechanism), it also increases employees’ future helping via the facilitation of helping self-efficacy (cognitive mechanism). We further draw on theories of attribution to propose that these effects depend on who was at fault for the helping failure, such that the effects are strengthened when coworker blame attribution is low. Results across four studies improve our understanding of the phenomenon of interpersonal helping failures, and the role of employee self-reflection in shaping the impact of these failures on future intentions and behavior.