My personal experience has been the opposite, actually. Early on, I realized that I was constantly being asked by coworkers to “look at this, look at that”, none of which were related to the work that my actual manager had assigned me. So I said no: I focused on what my manager was telling me to do. That seemed to be the “right thing” to do. Everybody hated me because I wouldn’t help them. They showed up in meetings and said they couldn’t meet their commitments because commandlinefan “wasn’t available to help me get CVS set up on my computer”. Management churn being what it was, I never had the same manager for more than six months anyway, so by the time performance reviews came around, whoever my manager-du-jour happened to be based my performance review on the consistently negative things he was hearing from my coworkers. I couldn’t even defend myself by pointing to having accomplished what the previous manager told me to focus on, either: priority churn being what it was, most of it ended up being scrapped before it was used. I finally saw the writing on the wall and did a complete 180. I became the most helpful guy in the world. If anybody, ever, for any reason, asked for my help, I dropped whatever I was doing and focused on helping them until their problem was fixed. Performance reviews went from “needs serious improvement” to “exceeds expectations”. I rarely, if ever, finish anything that I’m actually supposed to be working on, and nobody cares. It’s all reputation, and mine is stellar. I haven’t said no in 20 years and I’ve never been more loved by corporate.

A lot of people feel that way because they are deathly afraid of losing their job, not gaining or losing respect.