Works
- If You Need Help, Just Ask: Underestimating Compliance with Direct Requests for Help, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Underestimating compliance. In campus and field studies, people asking for help overestimated by about half how many people they would need to approach before someone agreed. Flynn and Lake attribute this to askers underestimating the social pressure others feel to say yes, and direct requests worked better than indirect ones.
What it explains
Flynn explains why people ask for less support than they could get: they overrate the chance of refusal. In organizations, a direct, specific request for backing is granted more often than the asker expects.