To give a fish or to teach how to fish: Examining leaders' autonomy and dependency helping behaviors

Leaders are uniquely positioned to support their employees, and when they do, both parties benefit. However, we still have limited insight into how leaders offer help. Leaders may provide dependency help-solving problems for employees-fostering reliance, or autonomy help-teaching employees to solve problems themselves-promoting empowerment. We draw on the theoretical rank-allocation framework of dominance and prestige to propose that leaders high on dominance (i.e., those driven to assert authority and control) are inclined to offer more dependency help and less autonomy help. Leaders high on prestige (i.e., those focused on earning respect and admiration) tend to offer more autonomy help and less dependency help. We further examine the role of zero-sum thinking in explaining these helping behaviors and how status threat moderates such responses. To test these hypotheses, we conducted two preregistered experiments, a field study with 128 employees and a large-scale preregistered time-lagged field study involving 105 supervisors and 420 employees. We also developed a scale to measure autonomy and dependency helping behaviors in the workplace. Four additional studies further test the robustness of our model and are reported in the Supplemental Information. Our findings shed light on the systematic ways leaders differentiate between offering dependency help and autonomy help. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).