Asia Pacific University Library catalogue

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation for the award of Doctor of Philosophy in Management (APUPF2008MGMT).

Helping behaviour was identified as proactive helping and reactive helping by Spitzmuller and Van Dyne (2013). Duan, Wong and Yue (2018) further distinguish between proactive helping behaviour and reactive helping behaviour, so as to explore the multidimensional nature of employee helping behaviour. Proactive helping behaviour is expressed as an attempt to meet the individual needs of the helper, while reactive helping behavior is an active healing response to the needs of others (Spitzmuller and Van Dyne, 2013).

The main purpose of this study was to examine the effects of trust, empathy, workplace fairness, job stress, job satisfaction on helping behaviour among SMEs employees. In addition, this study was examined the mediation effect of job satisfaction on the relationships between trust, empathy, workplace fairness, job stress and helping behaviour among SMEs employees.

The results of this study showed that some dimensions of employee helping behaviour positively predict some dimensions of trust, empathy, workplace fairness, job stress and job satisfaction among organizational variables. Trust had been found to have a positive impact on helping behaviour. Empathy had been found to have no direct impact on helping behaviour, but job satisfaction can partially mediate, such as intrinsic partially mediates empathy and proactive helping behaviour (peer-report), empathy and reactive helping behaviour (peer-report), empathy and reactive helping behaviour (self-report); extrinsic partially mediates the relationship between empathy and reactive helping behaviour (peer report). Job stress had also been found to have a positive impact on helping behaviour, job satisfaction intrinsic had partially mediates the relationship between job stress with reactive helping behaviour (self-report), proactive helping behaviour (self-report) and proactive helping behaviour (peer-report). job satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between job stress and reactive helping behaviour (peer-report), and reactive helping behaviour (self-report). Workplace fairness has been found to have a positive impact on helping behaviour, but only interactive fairness and reactive helping behaviour (self-report) had a positive relationship. Job satisfaction can partially mediate distributive fairness and helping behaviour.

The study on employee helping behaviour would be a hot topic in the future. Future studies can study whether the influence of the predictive variables in this study on the four dimensions of helping behaviour varies from department to department. This can increase the understanding of whether the influence of the predictive variables on the dimensions of the standard variable in this study is relevant to the national context, so that their applicability can be tested in different cross-cultural contexts.