Giving People The Words To Say No Makes Them Feel Freer To Say Yes

Managers regularly make requests of their employees. While employees’ compliance with such requests is of obvious importance to organizations, here we focus on the extent to which employees feel like they are complying freely, or, in other words, are truly consenting to these requests. How freely employees feel they have agreed to requests made by their employer can affect how much autonomy employees feel they have, how much they trust their employer, how committed they are to and perceive they are supported by their organization, and how fair they perceive the decisions and processes that take place within their workplace to be (Bohns & Schlund, 2020). While the benefits of securing employees’ free and voluntary agreement—i.e., their consent—are well documented, how to do so is less clear. Across two pre- registered studies, we tested two interventions that we hypothesized increase individuals' felt ability to say no. We found that a common intervention used to solicit consent (Written v. Verbal consent) may backfire, decreasing participants’ felt ability to say no. Conversely, we found that telling people how to say no, by explicitly providing them with a set of (rather unremarkable) words they could use to refuse a request, may be a promising intervention that can increase individuals’ feelings of voluntary agreement. Thus, a manager asking an employee to work late, who also cares about maintaining a healthy working relationship with their employee, may want to add a simple phrase to their request such as, “If you aren’t able to, just say you can’t tonight.”