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I Want To Be Busy: Instrumental Regulation Of Busyness Among Conscientious Individuals, Brandon Koh

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

A sense of busyness, the subjective feeling of having a long and effortful work schedule, is increasingly prevalent in today’s societies. Although people commonly feel busy because of externally imposed work pressures, the motivated self-regulation perspective suggests that people might intentionally put themselves in a busy state for instrumental reasons. Grounded in the instrumental emotion regulation framework, this research theorizes that people instrumentally regulate themselves to experience busyness – a negative affect – to facilitate a performance motive. In other words, people might desire to feel busyness despite its unpleasant hedonic tone in order to attain higher performance. Results from …