Research has revealed that employees hold varying perceptions regarding whether helping is a part of their job, and those with stronger perceptions tend to help others more. Based on this insight, both researchers and practitioners have emphasized the necessity of a human resources (HR) practice that formalizes helping, despite some criticisms. We introduce a comprehensive and balanced theoretical model to examine the pros and cons of a helping-inclusive HR practice, which formally integrates helping into employees' job descriptions and performance appraisals, on two critical aspects of employee helping: quality and frequency. Drawing from motivation and impression management theories, our model sheds light on the motivational mechanisms that underlie the positive and negative effects of this HR practice on helping. In a preliminary online experiment involving 133 participants and a one-year quasi-field experiment with 667 employees across 149 teams, we discovered that the helping-inclusive HR practice increased self-promoting motivation for helping but decreased intrinsic motivation for helping. These effects combined to decrease the quality of helping while increasing its frequency. Furthermore, our research revealed that supervisors heavily relied on the frequency of helping when assessing employees' annual performance, whereas the quality of helping was not factored into their assessments.
