Despite a substantial number of studies on employee helping, our understanding has been primarily based on the perspective of help providers. Such monotonic focus may risk an oversimplification of our knowledge about helping. In this article, we develop a conceptual framework which delineates feelings of territorial infringement, loss of face, and gratitude as different underlying mechanisms whereby the help recipients may decide to reject helping, to accept helping without further reciprocation, or to reciprocate the helpers in future when they encounter unsolicited offer of help from coworkers. Furthermore, we propose help recipients attributions for help providers various motives as boundary conditions for these mechanisms. In general, our theoretical work advances existing scholarship related to helping behavior by highlighting recipients salient, rather than passive, role in the helper-recipient relationship.