In a new organization, employees need to not only acquire the social knowledge and skills necessary to assume their role in the organization, but also adjust their attitudes and behaviors to adapt to the new organization under the guidance of other members. Supervisors, as the owner of status, resources, and power in a team, have always been known as the object of new employees in the relationship building process. The attitudes and behaviors of colleagues, as bystanders, are affected by the upward relationship building behavior adopted by new employees. Current research on the upward relationship building behavior mainly focuses on the perspectives of supervisors and new employees. However, there is little research has been done from an observer perspective. Based on the attribution theory, this paper introduces a situational factor, i.e., goal interdependence, to explore the impact mechanism and boundary conditions of new employees’ upward relationship building behavior on their colleagues’ willingness to help.

Data were collected through scenario simulation experiments, and employed workers were recruited to participate in the study. Finally, a sample of 233 participants were obtained. Participants were presented with two different types of new employee behavior (with upward relationship building behavior vs. without upward relationship building behavior), and a survey including mediating variables (colleague-attributed organizational concern motives and colleague-attributed impression management motives), outcome variables (colleagues’ willingness to help), and moderating variables (cooperative goal interdependence and competitive goal interdependence) was completed. Furthermore, we analyzed the data and tested the theoretical hypothesis using confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and hierarchical regression analysis.

The results demonstrate that: The upward relationship building behavior of new employees drives colleague-attributed organizational concern motives and then improves colleagues’ willingness to help; the upward relationship building behavior of new employees induces colleague-attributed impression management motives and then weakens colleagues’ willingness to help; the higher the interdependence of cooperative goal, the more likely it is to attribute the motives of new employees’ upward relationship building behavior to the motives of organizational concern, and the stronger the indirect impact of new employees’ upward relationship building behavior on colleagues’ willingness to help through the attribution about the motives of organizational concern. Therefore, this paper verifies the mediating role of colleague-attributed motives and the moderating role of cooperative goal interdependence, clarifies the mechanism of new employees’ upward relationship building behavior on colleagues’ willingness to help, and broadens the research perspective of new employees’ upward relationship building behavior.

This paper has three main contributions: First, it studies the impact of new employees’ upward relationship building behavior on colleagues’ willingness to help from the perspective of observer, which complements the lack of research. Second, drawing on the attribution theory, it demonstrates the mechanism of new employees’ upward relationship building behavior on colleagues’ willingness to help from both positive and negative aspects. Third, it reveals that cooperative goal interdependence can promote the colleague-attributed organizational concern motives toward new employees’ upward relationship building behavior and thus improve colleagues’ willingness to help, providing a reference for enterprises to promote the adaptation of new employees.