Seeking Advice in the Workplace: Attributions to Competence, Credit, and Collaboration

The decision to seek advice can be formally broken down into a cost-benefit model: the predict gain from receiving advice versus the predicted cost from ascertaining said advice. From an organizational perspective, efficiency gains are often realized when their employees transmit and share information through advice seeking and giving practices. However, from an individual perspective, there is a stable aversion toward seeking advice. This advice-seeking aversion is commonly caused by the desire to be perceived as competent by colleagues, bosses, and subordinates. The research in this dissertation aims to uncover the judgments and attributions made towards employees when their advice-seeking behaviors are revealed. Specifically, we capture whether advice-seeking employees are judged differently in their ratings of competence, credit for their work, and their collaborative abilities. We manipulate whether these employees have an established reputation of high ability skills, whether they exerted a high amount of effort on the task before seeking advice, and the perceived difficulty of the task at hand. In the end, we aim to fill a hole in the academic literature of advice-seeking by exploring observer attributions and reactions towards advice-seeking employees.