When do people prefer to be asked or told? The interplay between participative/directive advising style and expertise...

Conventional wisdom in the advisor-advisee literature predominantly condemns directive advising as detrimental and praises participative advising. However, such theoretical predictions seem inconsistent with existing findings. Our research aimed to reconcile this inconsistency by developing a balanced framework grounded in expectation states theory. We propose that the effect of advising style (i.e., participative vs. directive advising) on recommendation acceptance depends critically on advisors' expertise superiority relative to advisees. Across three studies conducted in different advisor-advisee contexts (i.e., doctor-patient, hairdresser-customer, and lawyer-client), we demonstrate that while participative advising is more acceptable when advisors' expertise superiority is lower, directive advising can be equally effective when advisors' expertise superiority is higher. This pattern emerges because expertise superiority shapes advisees' desired participation, creating different participation expectation validation scenarios under participative versus directive advising. Our research suggests that directive advising can be as effective as participative advising in certain situations, offering novel insights into the contingent effectiveness of participative versus directive advising for recommendation acceptance in advisory relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).