How and When Employees Proactively Extend the Benefits of Past Positive Work Events to Coworkers

Positive work events are ubiquitous and benefit employees in myriad ways. Notwithstanding, dominant theories of work events portray events as temporally bounded external happenings, and employees as immediate and reactive beneficiaries of events. Moreover, mainstream management theories suggest that positive work events are advantageous to direct beneficiaries, but not to others. In this paper, we challenge these existing theoretical tenets by integrating theory on self-conscious emotions and capitalization to posit that employees who engage in workplace interpersonal capitalization experience pride and subsequently share knowledge with their coworkers. Going further, we suggest that these effects are bounded by whether the disclosed positive work events are attributed to effort, and whether disclosers perceive responsiveness in their coworkers during capitalization. Stated differently, we maintain that employees can “rekindle the fire” of positive work events in terms of generating pride, which in turn motivates employees to “spread the flames” by sharing knowledge with coworkers. A source- and time-separated field study provides support for our hypotheses. Our work broadens current conceptualizations of positive work events by developing theory regarding how employees can proactively extend their past positive event benefits to themselves and ultimately to others.