Verbal Strategies for Seeking Help in Organizations¹

Abstract

The verbal strategies used to frame requests for help are integral to the help‐seeking process. Drawing on politeness theory, it was predicted that gender, power, and norms affect usage of verbal strategies in seeking help, and verbal strategies predict interpersonal outcomes. Two studies showed that: (a) individuals used more strategies under collectivistic than individualistic norms; (b) under individualistic norms, men used more strategies when seeking help upward, and women used more strategies when seeking help laterally; and (c) those who used more strategies provided higher quality information, and were perceived more favorably by others. These results suggest that verbal strategies not only reflect important relational and contextual factors, but also serve multiple social functions.

Conversing across cultures: East-West communication styles in work and nonwork contexts.

“…Goffman (1967) argued that indirectness reflects, in particular, the motivation to save face or create a positive public image for others. There is extensive empirical evidence demonstrating that people do indeed attend more to indirect meaning during communication when they are motivated to save face for others and preserve interpersonal harmony (Brown & Levinson, 1987;Earley, 1997;Hall, 1983;Holtgraves, 1997;Lee, 1999;Ting-Toomey et al, 1991). Although indirectness can reflect more malevolent motivations (DePaulo & Kashy, 1998), or lead to avoidance, vagueness, equivocalness, and even deception (Lee, 1993), indirectness typically signals one's concern for another's face.…”

“A Give Grief Kind of Guy”: Help‐Seeking, Status, and the Experience of Helpers at a University IT Help Desk

“…Requests by staff were often “other‐enhancing strategies” (Lee :1479) through which requestors enacted deference. For example, a woman staff requestor visiting The Help Desk said apologetically, “I'm creating problems.” In reply, Sue, the ITS worker on duty, dismissed her concern, saying “It's okay—we're here to fix problems,” reassuring her of her right to service.…”

“…While help‐seeking might seem to be a straight‐forward process whereby an individual in need of help (henceforth, the requestor) seeks out another individual who can provide the necessary assistance (the helper), help‐seeking is often a fraught interactional process in which power inequalities, individual and contextual factors (e.g., gender, organizational status), and social costs (e.g., feelings of incompetence by the requestor, a desire not to impose on the helper) shape both the decision to ask for help and the form a request takes (DePaulo and Fisher ; Lee , , ). Despite a stated emphasis on help‐seeking as an interactional process (Holtgraves and Yang ), researchers have generally ignored the helpers, treating them as the passive objects of requests rather than active participants in the interaction.…”

The effect of psychological well-being, psychological help-seeking attitudes and self-esteem on psychological counselor candidates’ psychological symptoms<p>Psikolojik iyi oluş, yardım arama tutumu ve benlik saygısının psikolojik danışman adaylarının psikolojik belirtilerine etkisi

“…Psikolojik belirtilerle ilgili bir diğer kavram ise, yardım arama davranışı olup, yardım arama yaşam sürecinde oldukça uyum sağlayıcı bir işlevi (Lee, 1999); olumsuzluklarla başa çıkma yolu olması (Frydenberg ve Lewis, 1993); bireylerin ruh sağlığı ve genel iyilik halini etkilemesi açısından birçok disiplinin incelediği konulardan birisidir (Rickwood, Deane, Wilson, ve Ciarrochi, 2005). Psikolojik yardım arama, bireylerin yaşadıkları zorlukların üstesinden gelebilmeleri için farklı destek kaynaklarından yararlanmaları (Nicholas, Oliver, Lee, ve O' Brien, 2004); genel olarak diğer insanlardan aktif olarak yardım arama davranışını ifade eder.…”