Lean on me: A daily-diary study of the effects of receiving help in coworking spaces*

Although receiving help is largely viewed as a positive gesture, we argue that some people may interpret being helped differently depending on their self-views. We focus on help received while working in the novel context of coworking spaces. Coworking space members differ from traditional coworkers in that they are not structurally linked to each other and may even work in a different industry, thus eliminating the competitive and political trappings of normal workplace help exchanges. Employing a daily-diary methodology and applying affective events theory (AET), we confirm that being helped via the provision of feedback, problem solving, emotional support, and network connections results in both daily- and person-levels of vigor. Person-level vigor, in turn, impacts the creativity and coworking space departure intentions of the worker one month later. We further predict and find, consistent with self-verification theory, that participants with higher self-esteem experience more vigor resulting from receiving help from others as compared to those experiencing lower self-esteem. Collectively, these findings suggest that some people may benefit from working in these new work contexts more than others.