Fisher, Colin; Pillemer, Julianna; Amabile, Teresa; (2024) When the Thought Doesn’t Count: The Dynamics of Unhelpful Help in Creative Organizations. Academy of Management Discoveries 10.5465/amd.2023.0160. (In press).

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Abstract

We’ve all been there. You ask a colleague for help with something, maybe a tricky research design or a difficult student. They agree to help, but their assistance misses its mark. You wonder what happened and, if you turn to existing research and theory, you don’t find much illumination. Armed with experience sampling and interview data from a design consultancy, we explored instances of unhelpful help – any instance in which potential help-givers agree to help, but instead deliver nothing or something that receivers find of little or no value. This happens, we discovered, because two aspects of the organization that, ideally, should facilitate creative work can instead operate as hazards: flexibility in role definitions, and – ironically – strong helping norms. These hazards play a role in three critical junctures: the helping request, the help itself, and the helping aftermath. This research paves the way for scholars to more deeply understand conditions driving unhelpful help, illuminates unforeseen downsides of organizing for creative work, and shows how creative workers and their leaders can increase the chances that help will be truly helpful.

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