Abstract: As an important subject of workplace helping behavior, the psychological feelings of recipients cannot be ignored. Based on the conservation of resource theory and from the perspective of recipients, this research explores the impact of receiving emotional help and instrumental help on the recipient’s resource acquisition and depletion in an organizational context, as well as the further impact on their work engagement and deviant behavior. In this study, we use experience sampling method to collect 748 data points from 109 employees over 10 days, and apply hierarchical linear model to analyze our data. The research results show that: (1) Emotional help and instrumental help both positively affect the recipients’ positive emotions, thereby increasing the recipient’s work engagement; (2) Instrumental help triggers recipients’ self-depletion, which in turn leads to the workplace deviant behaviors. This research enriches and expands the differentiated mechanisms of different types of help on work outcomes in organizational context, and offers important practical implication on how to promote mutual help in daily work simultaneously.

Key words: emotional help, instrumental help, conservation of resource theory, work engagement, deviant behavior