Research on the dark side of being prosocial at work has flourished in the past two decades. Given the personal costs of helping others at work, researchers and executive coaches have encouraged employees to say “no” bravely upon receiving help requests and highlighted the benefits of saying “no”. However, empirical testing of the personal implications of rejecting coworkers’ help requests (i.e., help request rejection) at work remains rare. Drawing on identity threat theory, this research challenges the view that help request rejection is beneficial to the request receivers by examining whether and when request receivers experience psychological burden after rejecting coworkers’ help requests. In a time-lagged field study, we found that rejecting coworkers’ help requests could bring about prosocial identity threat, which further led to disparate outcomes (i.e., increased public, but not private, helping and reduced task performance). The above effects were exacerbated among request receivers who held a higher level of helping identity or perceived higher helping pressure in the focal team. Theoretical and practical implications for helping decisions, prosocial identity, and identity threat management are discussed.
