In more layman terms, when pursuing promotion concerns, people are focused much more on gains. They view themselves as individual striving towards positive outcomes and avoiding the absence of such outcomes. In the application of such theory across genres, promotion focused individuals improve their relations with others through representative goals such as strengthening social connections and avoiding missed social opportunities. While within a prevention focused system, individuals would attempt to protect their relations with others by eliminating actions and events that might threaten their established social connections and the strong avoidance of social exclusion. The extent of how deeply promotion versus prevention systems is ingrained in individual personality can be related to the emotions associated with such personality types. Gains are experiences as the result of positive outcomes, thus promotion focused individuals strive to achieve the pleasurable state of elation and cheerfulness. Whereas prevention focused individual strive to achieve the state of “non-loss”, therefore their highest emotional status may be the pleasurable absence, such as relaxation and general quiescence.
The effects of a contrast in two mindsets induce differences in how individuals perceive pleasure and pain, but they also affect how individuals enjoy the intensity of pleasure versus pain. Promotion focused individuals strive for elation, and as a result they are involved in consistently high motivational arousal. Prevention focused systems tend to provoke less intensive positive feelings. Thus promotion focused individuals tend to be feel more intensely than the calmness of people who able to focus solely on prevention. However, the evident tradeoff is that low motivational arousal entails that failures also have a dramatically reduced affect on prevention focused individuals, because they tend to put themselves in positions of emotional and physical security. Those who are highly aroused emotionally, feels a much harder emotional impact from failure. Thus promotion focused individuals amplify both their pleasure and pain in a variety of spectrums.
The application of promotion versus prevention research however, does not explicitly mean that such personality systems reflect desired positive or negative end states. It is much more a broad application of how general desires can approach either approaching positives or avoiding negatives. The classic example forwarded by Higgins within the context of employee motivation is a situation of two employees working for a corporation. Both employees are highly motivated to work more than the standard forty hours a week, in order to gain a promotion at the end of the calendar year. Both of these individuals are striving towards a positive end state. However, for the first employee who has a promotion focused mindset, working overtime in order to earn a promotion is the next step towards improving his status within the corporation and helps his career. Where the second employee views his overtime and subsequent promotion as a necessary action to protect his status within the corporation and to keep up with his fellow employees. Thus although both employees have the same end state in mind, how they approach these motivations from a general personality system is invoked in their thought pattern, not in their ultimate outcome. The ambiguity that arises from simple assumptions of promotion vs. prevention mindsets can arise from merely assessing outcomes. Simple comparisons are made between established desires to either approach certain gains or avoidance certain losses. Researchers testing hypothesis tied to the problem of motivation for promotion and prevention often make the mistake of using ambiguous end states that can be applied to both personality systems.
Although there is a significant difference derived from promotion versus prevention motivation systems, one question that comes to mind is what causal factors determine when each of these motivations becomes active. If individuals have within them both advancement and security needs, then it merits dissection of how each need becomes active. Higgins conducted further study into this question in 2000, because promotion versus prevention focuses are associated with very distinct representations and experiences, and the situations that evoke them. When individuals goals involve gains incentives, pursuit of such goals tend to be promotion motivated. Whereas, goals that involve loss incentives will be prevention motivated. Still no clear method can be used to test how such needs will be specifically activated within individuals, this decision is very much one that is influenced by self-standards. Self-standards that involves terms of gaining or not gaining positive outcomes will inevitably lead to promotion focus, whereas the same can be said for prevention focus. Duty and obligation for instance are viewed through self-standards as naturally security based, and induce prevention focused mentality and motivation.
Overall it is evident from this discussion that the prevention versus promotion focus has an important affect on how individuals act and interact with each other. The above discussion looked at the general application of such systems reflect individual behavior, however, a much more specific look at the effects of such actions within the workplace must be reviewed before a test study can be conducted to answer our hypothesis.
Promotion versus Prevention: Application within the Workplace
The full implication of promotion versus prevention focused mentalities is on the explicit strategy decisions individuals make within this framework. The impact on strategy decisions within employee-employer relations is extremely important. In this section, we will look at how strategy decisions are different between promotion and prevention mindsets.
One area that has specific application to workplace environment is the consideration of alternatives and new ideas. Promotion focused individuals tend to be much more eager and accepting of alternatives. Under this mindset individuals are much more open to many possibilities and thereby set lower thresholds for accepting possibly important and relevant information. Thus, using such a strategy, an individual can have a significantly better change of identifying correct methodologies and avoid the error of omission in decision making. For management who take this strategy, risk taking is a significant part of the decision making matrix. This means that management wants individuals to endorse a method that “might” be correct, and risk being wrong, rather than not forwarding a method and miss the opportunity to succeed. In contrast, management that takes the prevention focused strategy will look at alternatives through a very narrowly defined window. This means that they have very strict criteria for acceptance and a higher threshold for potentially relevant information. This strategy can be taken by management in order to increase the chance of rejecting incorrect decisions, and avoiding risky commitments that cause severe losses. The obvious conflict that could arise within this instance is if employees and employers use contrasting strategies within the workplace. The tension that is inevitable could result in the breakdown of relationships between the two parties. Recent research conducted by Molden and Higgins in 2004 demonstrated that individuals with promotion focus tend to endorse more explanation for their performance than those with prevention concerns, and as a result form less certain impressions than those with prevention concerns as well. The tension that results when these two systems come in conflict can result in psychological stress and general reduction in workplace productivity.
Another important problem that arises within conflicting systems in the workplace is there effect on insight and creative thought. Management with a promotion focus generally tends to facilitate an exploratory approach to boost creativity. Whereas prevention focused management would narrowly consider alternatives and have a general inhibition for creativity. This management style difference is not necessarily wrong however. Those with a very strict method to achieve corporate goals tend to be more efficient, because less time is wasted on exploring ideas that become irrelevant later. Little research has been done into whether working within a prevention strategy management system is more or less satisfied.
In general promotion or prevention motivators cause people to behave and think differently about the consequences of their actions. People overestimate the probability of conjunctive events when they have a promotion focused mindset. This is because positivity in relations to business methods may result in people believing that the likelihood of any one individual event would correlate in their joint occurrence. In contrast prevention focused people tend to take all possible steps to ensure that all necessary steps have been taken to eliminate the possibility of loses, which means that prevention focused individuals have a much better grasp of how events can fit together.
In general it is evident that the prevention versus promotion model within the workplace can cause tension, and that either management style has their individual strengths and weaknesses. The key question that needs to be answered in this study however, is how conflict between employee-employers can occur when they have different systems emphasizing prevention and promotion. The next step will be a methodical research study on this subject.
Promotion versus Prevention within the Workplace: Test
In order to accurately test the relationship between such circumstances, the best applied methodology would be use psychological methods to induce both employees and employers to place themselves within promotion versus prevention frameworks and measure their responsiveness. Care however must be taken to ensure that the measurements focus on only a single common end state rather than a general one that could be applied through both mindsets.
To conduct this test the most important factor to consider is how to isolate corporate strategies that side with either the promotion or prevention strategy focus. In order to be the most accurate, this study will filter companies within two industries: investment banking and internet technology. In the first industry, general corporate focus is conservative in nature, and asset management strategies generally favor prevention focused. This is because wealth attainment and accruement is reflected through compound gains through years of investing rather than instantaneous wealth. By selecting from the investment banking corporations to study management behavior, we will select 200 managers from highly respected and prevention strategy based corporations. Conversely the technology sector will be significantly focused on individuals who act in a manner conducive to promotion strategy, because taking risks and intensive innovation is the key strategy towards success. Managers and employees taken from this sector would be significantly more promotion focused than prevention focused.
The next step is to induce individuals from these two environments to think within circumstances and articulate their thought process. Managers from the investment banking sector will be asked to consider how they would react to suggestions from employees to take a highly risky position and to explore investment opportunities in a very unpredictable environments and industries. At the same time, they will also be induced to think about an environment where employees work within the framework of already popular or common trends to create “safe investments” and to judge the merits of such actions. At the same time, employees from the investment banking industry will be asked to place themselves within a situation where management created a tiered system of earnings, where high profit quotas result in fast promotion and career advancement, and mediocre quotas result in less but steady advancement. Similarly they will be asked about a work environment where corporate advancement is only performed through cyclical reviews and not based on performance at all. Individuals within the high technology sector will be asked a similar set of questions relating to the above standard. The purpose would be establish a association between how these individuals behave and to identify them as either promotion focused and prevention focused individuals. Once managers and employees provide responses to these scenarios, detailed descriptions and mapping of their thought process will begin. The fundamental question that they will have to answer is whether or not working within such a system would induce, conflict, stress, and eroding of relationships. The thought process mapping would only occur, after we can determine whether these individuals are promotion or prevention focused. Thus, we can monitor and record how their actions can be reflected across the scenarios established within this debate.
The results of this study show that there is a strong correlation towards both conflict and unity when conflicts between promotion and prevention occur. Date shows that the effects on employee-employer relations may very well be much more impacted from the employee perspective rather than the employer perspective. Employees who are promotion focused that encounter a prevention focused management, are extremely frustrated because goal achievement does not reflect rewards. Several factors appear to come into play, first employees feel that they have less of an ability to work independently and that supervision is much stricter. Second, they perceive a rise of hostility between themselves and managers because they are restricted in their ability to assess situations. However, employees with promotion focus in such a circumstance do not feel demonization to work less or decrease their productivity. The converse is true because they must expand more energy to apply management specific directives into action rather than pursue their independent vision. When prevention focused employees confront promotion focused employers, they feel a much greater burden to excel within the framework of they are provided. They feel greater tension with management because they are forced to think within an unstructured system, and feel that management demands greatly exceed what should be expected of them. However, in terms of production and motivation, they also do not feel a severe lack of either concentration because they are significantly more motivated to retain their employment and be within the good graces of management. However, the effect on management appears to be minimal in that they perceive employees with both promotion and prevention focused mentalities as hard workers and highly productive. They appear to have no tension towards those with conflicting systems because their overall productivity tends to remain at a high level.
A strong association between stress and promotion vs. prevention mentality conflicts is evident. However, this does not conclusively mean that both sides feel that there is no way to manage or solve such a structured difference. In fact, the study shows that individuals tend to translate themselves towards management motivation whether prevention or promotion focused, because they want to be on the same motivational plane as their employers. Stress however does occur when there is a conflict between these two roles because employees feel that they have less substantive control of their situation. For promotion focused employees, this means that they feel a stifling of their creativity and general independence. For prevention focused individuals it means that they have consistent stress as a result of attempting to work within an established system and meet the expectations of dynamic change and innovation from a management that demands promotion focused goals. This stress appears to be unavoidable because it is the result of two conflicting thought processes. However, it does not show that employees suffering from stress decrease their productivity or motivation level, because they all have the same reflected end state goals.
Corporations that function as only prevention focused or promotion focused strategies will inevitably experience the shortcomings associated with both. A blending of management style and employee focus is necessary to maximize the gains and minimize the harms associated with both strategies. Management that exclusively focuses on a promotion strategy will inevitably waste resources on exploring many different methods and technology, and could inevitably becomes either too stretched in terms of resources or collapse through lack of internal focus. However, management that is exclusively motivated by prevention will lack the ability to innovate and become one step behind their competition. They will consistently be focused on cost cutting and thus must compete “within the trenches” for profit gains, without the ability to isolate new techniques and methods to forward themselves. Employees at the same time, cannot be exclusively promotion or prevention focused, because that entails that they perceive end-states through exclusive lenses. Those employees that are promotion focused often can have dramatic failures which can both decrease their productivity and synergy with management. Prevention focused employees can become too conservative and as a result never achieve significant career or financial gains. The ultimate conflicts however, occur when there is a conflict between management and employee focus and strategies. Such differing promotion versus prevention focuses causes the fundamental reasons and thought processes of individuals to change and this cause significant stress. However, because both of these types of systems must be employed within the workplace to gain the most productivity from employees, it is necessary for employers to note this conflict and aggressively attempt to minimize its impact. What this means is that employees must take positive steps towards understanding what motivation types works the best with their employees and adapt their strategies accordingly. This can be done when managers tailor their rewards system and corporate philosophy into something that is extremely flexible and that allows them to incorporate motivation for both types of systems. Many corporations and current HR practices already use this methodology within their current corporate philosophy, and as a result they can establish strong employee-employer relationships even if the decision matrix employed by these individuals contrast. The importance is in acknowledging that there is a fundamental difference in promotion versus prevention focused individuals. However, their established motivational systems, does not have to reflect negatively upon how they utilize and establish themselves towards achieving an end state.
In conclusion, the research conducted and reviewed in this study has demonstrated that concerns with advancement versus security are distinct thought process that creates a fundamentally different way for processes of evaluation, judgment and ultimate decision making. However, within the workplace setting the prominence and importance of employee-employer relationships can influence how an individual selectively applies their system of motivation. This means that the pursuit of end states can still be a cohesive and unified pursuit. It is up to each individual management system to understand the necessity of allowing employees to work within both a promotion and prevention focused motivation system.
Works Cited
Higgins, E. T. (2002). Regulatory focus and the probability estimates of conjunctive and disjunctive events. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 87.
Cacioppo (1993). Rudimentary determinants of attitudes: II. Arm flexion and extension have differential effects on attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65.
Carver, C. S. (1999). Self-discrepancies and affect: Incorporating the role of feared selves. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25.
Davidson, R. J., & Irwin, W. (1999). The functional neuroanatomy of emotion and affective style. Trends Cognitive Sciences, 3.
Evans, L. M (2003). Self-guide framing and persuasion: Responsibly increasing message processing to ideal levels. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 313-324.
Feather, N. T. (Ed.) (1982). Expectations and actions: Expectancy-value models in psychology (pp. 53-95). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Higgins, E. T. (2005). How global versus local perception fits regulatory focus. Psychological Science, 16, 631-636.
Higgins, E. T., & Bianco, A. T. (2003). Speed/accuracy decisions in task performance: Built in trade-off of separate strategic concerns. Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 90.
Higgins, E. T. (1998). Approach and avoidance strength during
Goal attainment: Regulatory focus and the “goal looms larger” effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75.
Friedman, R. S (2005). Effects of motivational cues on perceptual asymmetry: Implications for creativity and analytical problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88.
