It Doesn't Hurt to Ask: Employees Overestimate the Interpersonal Costs of Extension Requests.

Employees today experience high levels of time stress at work, undermining their health, happiness, and productivity. In this project, we propose a novel cause and possible solution to the stressful feeling of not having enough time to complete one's tasks at work: employees' willingness to ask for deadline extensions. Results from one archival data and four experiments (N = 3,444 suggest that employees avoid asking for more time and submit suboptimal work, even when supervisors often readily grant their employees more time. We document a mechanism for these results: Employees fail to ask for extensions due to the belief that asking for more time will cause them to look incompetent in the eyes of their supervisors. Yet, supervisors do not necessarily perceive extension request as a sign of incompetence. These findings highlight a previously unexplored impression management strategy in the workplace ' avoiding extension requests ' as a contributor to unnecessary time stress at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]