It Doesn't Hurt to Ask (for More Time): Employees Often Overestimate the Interpersonal Costs of Extension Requests

Jaewon  Yoon; Grant  Donnelly; Ashley V. Whillans

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

It Doesn't Hurt to Ask (for More Time): Employees Often Overestimate the Interpersonal Costs of Extension Requests

by Jaewon Yoon, Grant Donnelly and Ashley V. Whillans

Abstract

Setting deadlines can improve productivity. Yet, miscalibrated deadlines are a major source of stress, undermining employees’ health and happiness. An effective strategy to maximize the benefits of deadlines while minimizing the costs could be to set task deadlines and adjust them as needed. However, results from six studies (N = 4,297) show that employees frequently avoid requesting extensions on adjustable deadlines, instead submitting suboptimal work. Employees’ reluctance to ask for deadline extensions is driven by self-presentation concerns: employees believe that their supervisors will view them as incompetent if they request a deadline extension. In contrast to these beliefs, supervisors actually perceive extension requests as a sign of greater motivation (vs. incompetence). These findings suggest that employees often underutilize a proactive behavior at work—making extension requests on adjustable deadlines—due to incorrect perspective taking and suffer from unnecessary time stress as a result.

Keywords: extension request; impression management; Employees; Time Management; Perception;

Language: English

Format: Print

56 pages

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Citation:

Yoon, Jaewon, Grant Donnelly, and Ashley V. Whillans. "It Doesn't Hurt to Ask (for More Time): Employees Often Overestimate the Interpersonal Costs of Extension Requests." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-064, January 2019. (Revised August 2019.)

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Appendix

Dramatic reductions in carbon emissions must take place immediately. A human-centric method of reducing environmental impacts is to “nudge” individuals away from single-occupancy vehicle (SOVs) commutes toward more sustainable ones. While an abundance of research has focused on external determinants of mode choice, we know much less about the behavioral determinants. The field of behavioral science is therefore overdue for a focus on transportation. First, we describe the founding of our multidisciplinary research team. Next, we describe barriers to behavior change and outline lessons learned. Lastly, we describe how COVID-19 has shaped this research. This paper is meant to facilitate communication between researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in order to develop a behaviorally-informed framework that can be leveraged by policymakers, government, and organizations worldwide.

Spending money on time-saving services can improve happiness and reduce stress. Yet many people do not spend money to save time even when they can afford to do so, potentially because they feel guilty about paying other people to complete disliked tasks on their behalf. Consistent with this proposition, we find evidence that individuals are most likely to experience guilt when outsourcing to a salient service provider. Across two large-scale surveys of working adults, including a nationally representative sample of employed Americans (Study 1a & 1b, N = 1,140), individuals reported greater guilt when they thought about outsourcing to a salient (vs. non-salient) service provider. Using a novel lab paradigm, participants felt greater guilt when the service provider was salient, which in turn undermined their willingness to buy time (Study 2, N = 350). In Study 3, these effects were mitigated by emphasizing the benefits of task completion for the service provider (N = 390). This research points to the potential of simple interventions to help organizations encourage individuals to make time-saving purchases.

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It Doesn't Hurt to Ask (for More Time): Employees Often Overestimate the Interpersonal Costs of Extension Requests

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