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Not Motivated to Act During Goal Pursuit: Powerlessness Blocks Motivation Transfer in Goal Systems
(2013)
The current research investigates a motivational mechanism that contributes to the inferior goal striving and attainment of powerless individuals: the transfer of motivation from goals to means. We expected that this mechanism would work effectively only in powerful individuals. The results of an experiment and a field study confirmed our assumptions. The more motivated powerful people were to attain the goals, the more they engaged in self-determined action and, in turn, the more positively they experienced goal-related activities. No such relation was found for their powerless counterparts. Implications for power research and goal systems theory are discussed.
Purpose ‐ Regulatory focus theory (RFT) can successfully predict and describe organizational behaviour and managerial decision making. However, no empirical study has tested its central assumption in an organizational context. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between employee's regulatory focus and their work priorities. Design/methodology/approach ‐ In total, 307 employees from the public and private sectors in Germany participated and three organizational priorities were confirmed in a confirmatory factor analysis: growth, existence, and relatedness aspects. Their relationship with employee's regulatory focus was analyzed using multi-level modeling. Findings ‐ It was found that employees' promotion and prevention focus were related to specific work priorities: the higher a person's promotion focus, the more the person valued growth aspects. The higher the prevention focus, the more the person valued existence-related work aspects. Both regulatory foci increased the importance of good relationships at work. Research limitations/implications ‐ The findings provide new insights into previous research on the impact of personality traits, especially regulatory focus, on job-related attitudes like job satisfaction or job commitment. Practical implications ‐ The results are useful for leaders and human resource managers aiming to understand the driving forces behind employee's job motivation and decisions. Originality/value ‐ This is the first study to address the central question of different priorities associated with promotion and prevention focus in the organizational field. Results provide insight into previous findings on the impact of regulatory focus on job-related attitudes and offer practical implications for practitioners interested in job motivation and decision making.
Employee creativity is critical to organizational competitiveness. However, the potential contribution made by the workspace and the physical environment is not fully taken into account because, up to now, it has been rather unclear how aspects of the physical environment, especially light, can support creativity. Consequently, in six studies, the present research investigated the effect of light and darkness on creative performance. We expected that darkness would offer individuals freedom from constraints, enabling a global and explorative processing style, which in turn facilitates creativity. First, four studies demonstrated that both priming darkness and actual dim illumination improved creative performance. The priming studies revealed that the effect can occur outside of people's awareness and independent of differences in visibility. Second, two additional studies tested the underlying mechanism and showed that darkness elicits a feeling of being free from constraints and triggers a risky, explorative processing style. As expected, perceived freedom from constraints mediated the effect of dim illumination on creativity. Third, moderation analyses demonstrated the effects' boundary conditions: the darkness-related increase in creativity disappeared when using a more informal indirect light instead of direct light or when evaluating ideas instead of generating creative ideas. In sum, these results contribute to the understanding of visual atmospheres (i.e. visual messages), their importance for lighting effects, and their impact via conceptual links and attentional tuning. Limitations as well as practical implications for lighting design are discussed
Impulse and reflection jointly drive people's behavior. However, the impact of the physical environment, especially light and brightness, on reflective and impulsive behavior and the underlying processes have not been understood. We expected that light and brightness would increase self-awareness and, in turn, lead to a reflective and controlled self-regulation. Five studies confirmed our assumptions. Particularly, participants in a brightly lit room reported a higher public self-awareness than those in a dim room. Moreover, brightness triggers more controlled and reflective forms of self-regulation independent of whether lighting conditions (Study 2) or priming methods (Study 3) were used to manipulate brightness. Finally, two additional studies revealed that brightness facilitates the suppression of desires and socially undesirable impulses which signals high self-control. Overall, these results contribute to the understanding of automatic effects of light and brightness and effortless self-control. Limitations as well as practical implications for lighting design in therapeutical settings and retail spaces and are discussed.
This article investigates the interplay between darkness, construal level, and psychological distance based on the link between environmental lighting conditions and visual perception. In the dark, visual perception becomes less focused and detailed, leading to more abstract representations. We argue that this link between physical darkness and a global perceptual processing style spills over to the conceptual level. In three experiments, darkness triggered a more global perceptual and conceptual processing style than did brightness, regardless of whether the darkness was physically manipulated or primed. Additionally, two Implicit Association Tests (IATs) showed that darkness is more strongly associated with high-level construal than with low-level construal. Moreover, drawing on the generalized link between construal level and psychological distance, we proposed that darkness is also linked to perceived psychological distance because the lack of detail information and the abstract representations in the dark remove objects and other persons from people’s direct, detailed experience. Eight IATs confirmed the implicit link between darkness and four dimensions of psychological distance. These implications of these results are discussed with regard to thinking styles and social processes like stereotyping and cooperation.