Exploring Expertise Creep: An examination of the factors that moderate the relationship between willingness to give advice and knowledge

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Expertise creep (hereafter creep) occurs when an advisor gives advice on a topic that extends beyond his or her knowledge. Creep is a problem because the same lack of expertise that causes decision makers to seek advice, limits their ability to evaluate advice quality. Since sound decision making depends on good advice, this requires that prospective advisors who know very little about a topic should be unwilling to give advice, while prospective advisors who know a lot about the topic should give advice. Unfortunately, since people do not generally know the true extent of their knowledge, the best that can be hoped for is that prospective advisors will consult their subjective knowledge before deciding whether or not to give advice. Based on this reasoning, the current research will explore the factors that moderate the relationship between a prospective advisor's subjective knowledge and their willingness to give advice (WTGA). Viable factors for examination are surfaced from prior work on social compliance/resistance and Judge-Advisor Systems (JAS). Research on resistance suggests that to resist a request, such as one for advice, one must be motivated to care about the accuracy of his/her advice. This idea gives rise to a number of different factors that should influence WTGA. Likewise, the JAS literature has identified a number of factors that influence willingness to use advice. The proposed research is unique, in that for most of the past JAS studies, the advisor's knowledge level is not considered or measured. Additionally, no prior studies have examined an advisor?s WTGA and its relation to their subjective knowledge. The main objective of this research is to fill this gap. A secondary objective is to develop a normative standard for identifying when advisors creep beyond their expertise.