We've made an observation that if a requester is also capable of approving a step on a linked workflow that they auto approve said step. Can this behavior be changed?
No, there is really no setting to change this behavior. If the requester is also an approver for the request, then the approval level will be skipped.. If you had multiple approvers, including the requester, in a given the workflow level, then you could get around this by setting "process type" for the workflow to "linear".. While the requester would not have to approve, the other approvers would still have to approve.