Help-seeking practices in organizations

Help-seeking is a process used by employees, workers, and managers in organizations to request for help each other’s. Although it is an understudied topic, it is gaining attention since in the modern organizations’ employees become more productive and motivated if they feel safe and they trust their organization. Asking for help to solve working problems is then an opportunity to improve one’s work, to learn from others and become more performing. The aim of this paper is to analyse how help-seeking is considered by the existing academic literature and which are the level of analysis and the related issues connected.
We conducted a systematic literature review, considering some selected keywords. Of 808 potentially relevant results generated from two international online databases, 54 studies fully met the inclusion criteria.
Our results showed that the help-seeking can lead to individual personal and professional development, increased creativity and motivation and improved performance. The capability of asking for help depends not only on individual characteristics but also on contextual factors and therefore the remote working mode can make it more complicated.
Our research contributes both to academic research and to management policies. To the first since, of our knowledge, this is the first literature review on help-seeking, which is an emergent topic in the management research. It contributes to the management practice since it suggests some organizational policies and actions that can be implemented to improve the use of helpseeking.