Effects of Coworkers’ Helping Behavior on Employees’ Knowledge Sharing and Creativity: The Moderating Role of Interactional Justice

Abstract

Although it is important to examine how creative performance can be achieved by facilitating knowledge sharing activities among its members, few studies have examined these relationships. Therefore, this study analyzed the effects of coworkers’ helping behavior on knowledge sharing and creativity. It also attempted to demonstrate the moderating role of interactional justice as a situational variable that positively affects coworkers’ helping behavior. Using data from 200 full-time supervisor–subordinate dyads in a large public institution located in South Korea, we performed multiple regression analysis and the bootstrapping method to test our hypotheses. The results of this study presented that coworkers’ helping behavior encouraged individuals to share knowledge and increase their creative performance. Moreover, this study demonstrated that the positive effect of coworkers’ helping behavior on employees’ creativity through their knowledge sharing was stronger when interactional justice was high rather than low. Therefore, this research contributes to finding the critical factors that enable a company to gain a competitive advantage by providing the impact of coworkers’ helping behavior and supervisors’ interactional justice on knowledge sharing and creativity among employees.