The Neglected Costs of Helping: An Experiment on Motives for Harmful Support

Abstract

Mutual support among team members in organizations is highly prevalent and generally promoted. Yet, overly pronounced help can harm self-regulated learning and thus team performance. We analyze and manipulate motives for harmful support in a laboratory experiment, where teams of two repeatedly face real effort tasks. At the beginning, team members exogenously differ in task-related expertise. The experienced group member can grant support by undertaking the teammate's task. The treatments exogenously vary the environment in which teams interact. First, we introduce an interdependent time budget of both team members and, second, asymmetric information about scope for learning. Our results show that both conditions significantly increase the propensity to over-help. We investigate the role of control and risk preferences as well as patience as predictors for observed behavior. We find that helping can ultimately reduce overall team productivity and efficiency.