Short Summary
Workplace support is usually seen as an obvious positive. But well-meant support can have unintended negative effects. In our study on workplace support for refugee employees published in the Journal of Management Studies, we explain how support can accidentally create dependency or make people feel marginalized, especially since many refugees already feel vulnerable. We found that refugee employees and their supervisors and colleagues see support needs—and whether the support is appropriate—very differently. By comparing both perspectives, we show how expectations, communication, and reflexivity shape whether support empowers people or unintentionally holds them back. We also highlight what organizations can do to ensure their support is genuinely helpful.
Why Support Can Both Empower and Disempower
Due to large refugee movements, many companies have launched initiatives to hire and train refugees, driven by both humanitarian commitments and the recognition of refugees as valuable contributors. Refugee employees face multiple integration challenges, including language barriers, stereotyping and discrimination, mental health issues, and an uncertain legal status. The loss of social networks due to displacement intensifies these difficulties, positioning employers as a critical source of support. However, well-intended support can have unintended effects. What is designed to empower can disempower, leaving refugees feeling dependent, misunderstood, or overlooked.
Our study, conducted in German organizations with both refugee employees and their supervisors and colleagues, explores why this happens. We find that workplace support does not always succeed or fail because of the amount of help offered, but because of how support is understood and experienced by both sides. When providers – here, supervisors and colleagues – and recipients – here, refugee employees – interpret support needs differently, even generous efforts can backfire. This is what we refer to as the support paradox: the idea that support can both empower and marginalize at the same time.
Understanding support as a two-way, relational process allows organizations to move beyond good intentions. The key to effective workplace support lies not in offering more, but in cultivating a shared understanding of what kind of support is truly needed. Whether support empowers or unintentionally marginalizes depends on the match between support practices and refugees’ needs. When the provided practices do not match the needs experienced by the refugees, a mismatch occurs, setting the stage for the support paradox.
Three Constellations of Workplace Support
Our research reveals three support constellations that illustrate how workplace support takes shape in practice:
1. Work-centric support
In this constellation, support is organized around the immediate demands of the job. Managers concentrate on clarifying tasks, offering guidance on work processes, and ensuring that expectations are understood, but they rarely address refugees’ personal struggles outside work. For some refugees, this focus is welcome: they feel treated like any other employee and gain confidence in their work abilities. For others, especially those dealing with uncertainty, isolation, or trauma, this approach feels incomplete. When emotional or practical needs go unrecognized, support that appears “efficient” to the provider can feel like an absence of support and neglect to the recipient.
2. Caring versus intrusive support
This constellation reflects a more expansive approach in which support extends beyond workplace tasks into multiple areas of everyday life. Supervisors and colleagues invest significant time and energy in assisting refugees. They step in to solve problems both at work and in private life, for example, arranging housing, managing paperwork, or making decisions on the refugee’s behalf. While often motivated by genuine care, this approach can cross invisible boundaries. Refugees describe feeling grateful yet also dependent or infantilized, as if they are being “taken by the hand.” What feels caring from the supervisor’s perspective can feel like intervening to the refugee employee.
3. Self-help
Here, the emphasis lies on strengthening refugees’ capacity to navigate both work and daily life with increasing autonomy. Support consists of offering resources, information, and encouragement, while leaving room for refugees to take initiative, experiment, and make decisions. This balance allows individuals to build competence and a sense of ownership over their progress. Refugees often experience these relationships as respectful and confidence-building, as the support they receive helps them move forward without replacing their own efforts. This kind of support aligns with refugees’ sense of agency rather than undermining it.
Why Mismatches Occur
Our study shows that divergent perspectives between managers and refugees—both regarding support needs and what kinds of support are appropriate—can help explain the support paradox. However, this raises an important question: why do convergent and divergent perspectives emerge in the first place? Our empirical findings identify three underlying mechanisms.
Framing and perception
Support providers and refugees can hold different perceptions of support needs. Some supervisors view refugees as capable and resilient, others as vulnerable and in need of protection, and some simply as part of the workforce. These assumptions shape what kind of help they offer. For instance, when refugees are seen as helpless victims, employers may provide support that is perceived by refugees as overstepping and misaligned with their actual needs.
Support communication
How support is offered matters as much as what is offered. For instance, directive communication—telling someone exactly what to do—can signal doubt in their competence, even when meant kindly. In contrast, non-directive communication invites dialogue, allowing refugees to express what they need and to take ownership of their progress.
Reflexivity
The most successful relationships were those where both sides reflected and adjusted over time. When supervisors noticed that their close involvement was creating dependency, or when refugees began voicing their needs more clearly, the relationship shifted toward mutual understanding.
Taken together, these mechanisms show that workplace support is not a static exchange but an ongoing communicative process. Its success depends on how both sides interpret, communicate, and adapt support.
Rethinking “Helping” in Refugee Employment
Our findings show that improving support for refugees is not about offering more help but about ensuring that help aligns with what refugees actually need. Because support can empower or marginalize depending on how it is interpreted, organizations must pay attention not only to what they do, but to how it is understood.
Three practices make a difference. First, question assumptions about what refugees need; unspoken beliefs often drive mismatches. Second, create dialogue around support instead of deciding unilaterally what is helpful. Third, revisit support arrangements over time, as needs and expectations evolve.
Approaching support as a shared, adaptive process helps avoid the support paradox. When organizations engage refugees in shaping how support is provided, they are more likely to offer help that strengthens rather than unintentionally limits.
Conclusion
Our findings suggest that the real challenge in supporting refugee employees lies less in the quantity of help provided and more in how support relationships are structured and reflected upon. For employers, this means developing reflexive support practices: becoming aware of how their own framings of refugees shape what kind of help they offer, and creating space for ongoing dialogue about boundaries, autonomy, and changing needs. Training supervisors and colleagues to recognize when care turns into control, or when efficiency turns into neglect, can help prevent well-intended support from becoming disempowering.
For researchers, our study advances theorizing on the support paradox by shifting attention from optimal support levels to the relational mechanisms through which support becomes empowering or disempowering. By adopting a bidirectional and communicative lens, we invite future work to examine how perceptual convergence or divergence shapes workplace integration.
