Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

To Change Or Not To Change: How Regulatory Focus Affects Change In Dyadic Decision-Making, Jelena Spanjol, Leona Tam

Jelena Spanjol

Successful innovation requires teams to embrace and enact change. However, team members often differ in their preferences for change. We examine how regulatory focus affects dyadic teams’ tendencies to enact change across an array of repeated brand management decisions. Understanding such tendencies is important, since the innovation process is characterized by a series of investment decisions typically made by teams, yet prone to significant biases. Regulatory focus theory provides a framework for understanding the dominant motivations driving decision-making during goal pursuit. It argues that individuals operate under either a promotion or prevention focus, influencing preferences for stability vs. change. We …