JON IS USUALLY THE PERSON WHO ARRIVES AT THE MSC LAB FIRST in the morning, turns on all the lights, and settles himself into his (private) office. He keeps his door closed so that he can avoid being distracted by his colleagues while he works. He maintains a well-organized calendar and a daily to-do list. Ask him for a copy of a particular journal article, and he can retrieve it in about ten seconds from among the hundreds of papers neatly arranged by author in his filing cabinets. “Be sure to return it. I may need it,” he says. If you forget to, he will come looking for it—because he keeps a careful log of everything he lends to his less-conscientious fellow researchers.
Ray, on the other hand, strolls merrily into work around noon. He prefers to start his day at home, reading and sometimes writing when the mood strikes him. He shares his office with three other researchers by choice, because he finds their spontaneous brainstorming sessions stimulating. Some of his best ideas have been born of these freewheeling discussions. His desk is littered with papers and Post-it Notes, including one to remind him to call his mother. If you asked him for a copy of a particular journal article, you’d better take a seat because it’s going to be a while. (Which is why no one ever does ask him—they go to Jon, much to Jon’s chagrin.)
Jon and Ray work very differently, and it’s easy to understand why once you realize that our motivational focus determines not only our strengths and weaknesses, but also our preferred ways of managing what we do. Being able to identify and understand each focus can provide you with an invaluable tool in the workplace for increasing your employees’ effectiveness, as well as your own. (Teachers and coaches take note: these findings describe what we do in the classroom and on the playing field, too.)
As a leader or manager, a big part of your job involves putting the right people in the right positions. But how do you do that, exactly? How do you assign projects and assemble teams with maximum effectiveness? You could simply rely on your intuition as to who is good at what, which may be difficult when you haven’t worked with someone for long. Or you could take a more willy-nilly approach and draw names out of a hat. (As you may have already discovered, you can’t really count on the former being all that more accurate than the latter. Predicting performance isn’t easy.)
Or you could get “scientific” and use one of the popular personality inventories—perhaps the most popular one: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. (The one that tells you if you are an Extraversion-Sensing-Thinking-Judging type or an Introversion-Intuition-Feeling-Perceiving type or some other combination of its four basic dimensions.) That’s got to be better than the hat, right?
Over two million people take the MBTI each year, many for the purposes of hiring, structuring teams, and identifying employees with leadership potential. There’s just one small problem—it doesn’t predict performance. At all. In other words, knowing someone is an “ESTJ” or an “INFP” tells you nothing about whether or not the person will actually be good at the kind of tasks you’ve assigned him or her. And in fairness to the Myers & Briggs Foundation, it does not actually claim otherwise. According to its own “Ethics for Administering” guidelines (which you can read on its website): “Indicator results [should] never be used to label, evaluate, or limit the respondent in any way.” And from the site’s page titled “Ethical Guidelines”: “type does not imply excellence, competence, or natural ability” (emphasis original).
The irony, of course, is that this is exactly what managers need to know (and why they turn to personality inventories, which rarely predict anything useful, in the first place)—Who will be competent, able, even excellent in this position? How can I use what I know about my employees to predict their performance on a given task? And how can I use what I know about myself to choose a profession I will be well suited to?
One of the greatest benefits of understanding how promotion and prevention focus work is that it will give you a genuine, evidence-based window into strengths and weaknesses—the kind that translate into demonstrable differences in performance. If you are a teacher, you’ll have a better sense of where a child may excel and how he or she approaches problems. If you are an employer, you’ll know who should be in charge of seeking out new opportunities and who should be in charge of managing quality control. If you are a soccer coach, you’ll know who should be a striker and who should be a defender. (Interestingly, professional and semiprofessional coaches may grasp this intuitively—one study conducted in Germany showed that semipro soccer and field hockey players were more likely to play in “attacker” positions than “defender” positions when their dominant focus was promotion rather than prevention.)
So, what are promotion- and prevention-focused people good at?
It’s hard to beat our promotion-focused colleague Ray when it comes to creativity. Most researchers work by methodically moving forward in logical increments from what is known, filling in more and more details as they go along. (“If A is true, then it follows that B should also be true, so we’ll test that next.”) Ray likes to turn assumptions on their head—to go where no one has gone before. (“Everyone accepts A as a fact,” says Ray. “But what if A isn’t always true?”)
For instance, a few years back, Ray challenged the more or less universally accepted notion that improving is an unequivocally good thing. He wondered if suddenly (and unexpectedly) performing better on a task that you had failed on in the past might make you, without necessarily realizing it, a bit anxious and uncomfortable. After all, people like to think they know themselves and their abilities quite well, so surprises—even good surprises—can be disconcerting. It turned out Ray was right, as he was able to show in a series of clever and innovative studies. He took an intellectual risk, asked a question no one had ever asked before, and his efforts paid off.
Of course, not every creative idea of Ray’s has panned out. He has sometimes spent months trying to nail down the exact experiment that would prove other outside-the-box ideas correct, only to eventually concede that he was probably on a wild-goose chase from the start. (His creative ideas outside work aren’t always winners, either. He once had the bright idea that we go to a party and pretend to be Finnish, just to “liven things up.”)
Promotion motivation—seeing your goals in terms of gain—is generally more conducive to creative thought. When people are put into a promotion focus, they find it easier to generate creative solutions to a problem. When asked, “How many uses can you think of for a brick?” they are more quickly able to go beyond the obvious (e.g., pave a sidewalk, use as a paperweight) to the out-of-the-ordinary (e.g., use it to commit burglary by breaking through windows, or to turn off your TV—assuming you don’t ever want to turn it on again).
This has a lot to do with the fact that the promotion-focused are much more comfortable with taking chances, and consequently have a more exploratory information processing style. They worry less about every idea being perfect or even feasible, so they are open to more possibilities.1 Indeed, they would be more concerned about excluding a “crazy” idea that might just possibly turn out to be brilliant. And when they do come up with something new and exciting, they run with it. Enthusiastic idea support is another hallmark of being promotion-focused. It’s like having a built-in cheerleader.2
The prevention-focused, on the other hand, want ideas that are flawless and foolproof. Their critical mindset can sometimes hinder the creative process. (Interestingly, this happens at the level of the organization as well. When successful companies fail to innovate, what looks like complacency is often really a prevention-focused strategic defensiveness—a desire to protect the company’s gains by avoiding risk.)3
Unfortunately, the problem with promotion motivation is that while it may be great for creative idea generation, it’s not so well suited to creative idea evaluation—and this matters because, ultimately, you really do need to think critically about whether or not your idea will actually work. Prevention focus, on the other hand, leads to significantly greater accuracy when it comes to assessing idea quality.4
It’s important to keep in mind that creative thinking is not the only kind of “good” thinking. Analytical thinking, the kind of thinking where people methodically and logically draw conclusions from information they are given or from what is already known, is also “good” thinking. And research by MSC Fellow Jens Förster has shown that people with a prevention focus are usually better at analytical thinking than the promotion-focused, because they stick to the information they are given and consider it thoroughly when drawing conclusions, rather than trying to “go beyond” it and complicate the problem.
So the most effective teams or organizations will solicit (and respect) input from people with both kinds of dominant motivation when it’s time to innovate, while recognizing that their respective inputs will be most valuable at different stages of the process. (As we have personally found to be true with Ray and Jon. Ray is the one you take to happy hour with you after work, to come up with bold new ideas that you will scribble feverishly onto cocktail napkins. Then the next day, you bring your napkins to Jon—who tells you which ideas probably won’t work, which ones can’t possibly work, and which ones appear to be mustard stains. If you’re lucky, he says one is “promising, but a long shot”—and that’s the one you go with, because it’s probably gold.)
At the very end of 1998, NASA launched a much-anticipated robotic space probe called the Mars Climate Orbiter. Its mission was to collect data about the atmosphere and to act as a communications relay for the Mars Polar Lander. Nearly ten months later, it arrived at the red planet, only to disappear just as it was supposed to establish an orbit.
It had come, unintentionally, one hundred kilometers closer to the planet’s surface than originally planned, which was twenty-five kilometers beneath the level at which it could properly function. Instead of orbiting Mars, it plowed right through the atmosphere (possibly disintegrating) and was lost to us forever, taking $125 million in American taxpayer dollars with it.
The problem, it was later discovered, was one of unit conversion. The team of engineers at NASA worked in metric units (the standard they had adopted in 1990). The engineers at Lockheed Martin who helped build the Orbiter and its navigation systems, on the other hand, worked in English units of measurement (pounds, inches, etc.).
When asked how an error of this magnitude could have occurred (particularly one that seemed so simple to have gotten right in the first place), Tom Gavin, chief administrator of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said, “Something went wrong in our system processes, in checks and balances, that we should have caught this and fixed it.”
This is the kind of story that makes the prevention-focused shudder, and one immediately suspects that there isn’t (or at least wasn’t) nearly enough prevention thinking going on in the NASA labs. It’s not really surprising—these people, after all, are rocket scientists. They devote their lives to exploring space—if there is something more promotion-focused than that, we don’t know what it is. These folks pretty much own the phrase “going where no one has gone before.”
In this story there was no prevention-focused hero who averted this disaster. But it’s not that there are no prevention-focused heroes in our lives. It’s that they are so often unsung. You rarely get the credit you deserve for averting disaster when it never happens. No one says, “Way to convert those units from inches to centimeters, Bob. You just saved us $125 million and a boatload of humiliation. You rock!” Instead, the prevention-focused toil away, quietly and carefully, making sure that things work the way they are supposed to. They see to it that the airplane you are flying in won’t fall apart at its seams in midflight, that the medication you are taking wasn’t contaminated in the factory, and that your large skim mocha latte really is decaf so you won’t still be up at four a.m. watching the Weather Channel.
When what you are good at is keeping things running smoothly, and things do run smoothly, your contribution is less likely to be noticed. So you probably won’t get the praise you have in fact earned. (Unless you are the immediate successor to someone who let things go to hell in a handcart—then people will appreciate you, at least for a little while.)
Prevention-focused people are great with details—they look for them, and they remember them. (And if they think they might have trouble remembering the details, they write them down on a list. If you really love your personal organizer, or get excited about how your calendar and to-do list apps are fully integrated, you are probably prevention-focused.) Their vigilant approach to any task makes them quick to spot a problem, or a potential problem down the road. And because they focus on stopping losses, such as obstacles that might derail their goals, they are better at resisting temptations and distractions than those who think about their goals in terms of what they have to gain.
If Team Promotion and Team Prevention had mascots, they would undoubtedly be the Hare and the Tortoise, respectively. Like the speeding bunny who ran his fastest to win the race, promotion motivation leads to a preference for working quickly—to eagerly get to the finish line, and avoid missing any opportunities for gain. The prevention-focused, like the slow-moving turtle, work deliberately—steadily and carefully—to vigilantly guard against error.5
Of course, speed and accuracy are one of those classic trade-offs. The faster you go, the more likely you are to make mistakes. The more accurate you are, the longer your work is likely to take. This is why Team Promotion sometimes turns in sloppy work—they are the ones who forget to use spell-check before turning in an assignment or never seem to be able to balance their checkbooks because it takes too long to record each check. It’s also why Team Prevention seems to move like molasses, checking and rechecking their work while you drum impatiently on your desk, wondering when they will finally be finished. (Legal departments are filled with the prevention-focused, one of the reasons why their involvement in any project with a tight deadline is met with such dread.)
Incidentally, we are certainly not saying that the tortoise wins against the hare, as he did in Aesop’s fable. Team Prevention isn’t, overall, superior to Team Promotion—any more than accuracy is necessarily better than speed. Really, it’s more correct to say that for some things you want a rabbit, and for others you’re better off with the turtle.
Much to the chagrin of economists everywhere, people are not rational. But their behavior isn’t random, either—it is, as Dan Ariely famously put it in his excellent book by the same name, “predictably irrational.” One of the best-known kinds of predictably irrational behavior has been called the endowment effect—the idea that once something is in your possession, it becomes more valuable to you because it’s yours and you don’t want to lose it. (This is why, for example, people selling their homes always think they are worth more than buyers do. Also, why your spouse is so unwilling to part with the worn-out remains of a concert T-shirt from 1988—the one he insists he “might wear again someday.”)
As it happens, recent research suggests that people are not always biased in this particular way. The endowment effect is most likely to happen when we engage in prevention-focused thinking about avoiding losses.6 In general, prevention motivation makes us prefer stability (nonloss) over change (potential loss)—it makes us wary of switching activities or strategies in midstream. When we are promotion-focused, on the other hand, we are more willing to trade in our old stuff for new stuff, or drop what we’re doing to try something else, since change represents the potential to gain something even better. (These are the people who will gladly exchange their current prize for whatever’s behind Door Number 3. The possibility for a bigger gain is just too good to pass up.)
Negotiating well is a powerful skill, but it doesn’t come naturally to most people. That’s because negotiation is an experience that is almost always rife with conflict. When two parties haggle over price, for instance, the buyer needs to somehow reconcile his desire to pay the lowest possible price, with the knowledge that if he bids too low, the negotiation may break down and the seller could walk away.
The same holds true when it comes to negotiations over salary—managers want to keep costs down, without losing their best people to better-paying jobs. And employees want to get the highest possible salary, without overplaying their hand and getting in trouble, or simply humiliated, in the process.
One key to a good outcome in any negotiation is a strong (and defensible) opening bid, since that bid will serve as the jumping-off point, as well as the frame of reference, for the negotiation that follows. You are never going to end up paying less than your initial offer when buying a car, or getting a bigger salary than you asked for when starting your new job. But a strong opening bid takes a certain amount of gutsiness—you need to overcome all those perfectly rational concerns you may have about taking things too far, only to end up embarrassing yourself and failing completely. What kind of motivation provides the necessary moxie? You guessed it—promotion motivation.
In one study, psychologist Adam Galinsky and his colleagues divided fifty-four MBA students into pairs and asked them to take part in a mock negotiation involving the sale of a pharmaceutical plant. Students were assigned to the roles of “seller” and “buyer,” and both were given detailed information about the circumstances of the sale, including the fact that the “bargaining zone” would range from $17 million to $25 million.
Galinsky then manipulated the motivational focus of the buyers by asking them to think about either the negotiation behaviors and outcomes they would “hope to achieve” and how they could “promote” them, or the ones they would “seek to avoid” and how they could “prevent” them. Each pair then began their negotiation with an opening bid from the buyer.
Promotion-focused buyers opened with a bid an average of nearly $4 million less than prevention-focused buyers! They were willing to take the greater risk and bid aggressively low, and it paid off in a big way. In the end, promotion-focused buyers purchased the plant for an average of $21.24 million, while prevention-focused buyers paid $24.07 million. This is one of those things that’s worth taking a moment to think about—two negotiators, each armed with identical information, facing similar opponents, and yet one pays nearly $3 million more for the same plant.
Approaching a goal with a promotion mindset helps a negotiator to stay focused on his or her (ideal) price target (also referred to as the “aspiration price” in the negotiation literature). A prevention mindset, however, leads to too much worrying about a negotiation failure or impasse, leaving the buyer more susceptible to less advantageous agreements.
Successful entrepreneurs need to be good at a lot of different things—they need to have bold vision, pay attention when opportunity knocks, and be willing to take a chance on their own ideas (and other people’s). But they also need to avoid throwing caution to the wind—they need to assess the marketplace accurately and be able to approach their endeavor with a critical and realistic eye. So the recipe for entrepreneurial success involves hearty helpings of both motivations: promotion for generating ideas, taking risks, seizing opportunities, and acting quickly; prevention for evaluating ideas, tackling obstacles, and performing due diligence.7 Entrepreneurial ventures (and, for that matter, established businesses) will likely fail when their leadership lacks the necessary motivational balance. Without promotion focus, with its ideal aspirations, your approach will be too timid to earn a big payoff. Without prevention focus, with its realistic attention to the nitty-gritty, your brilliant ideas may never see the light of day. You’ll need people with both kinds of focus at the table, making decisions that cover all the bases (or that rare solo entrepreneur who is very high on both promotion and prevention).
Or, perhaps more accurately, who’s the better boss? The one willing to embrace risk and innovate, or the one you can count on to run a tight—and reliable—ship? Business leaders often have unambiguously promotion- or prevention-minded philosophies when it comes to how they do their jobs. Take, for instance, these two pieces of sage advice from successful CEOs:
When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for everyone telling you you’re nuts.
—Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle
In other words, innovation (which we can all agree is a good thing) requires taking chances. Ellison is arguing that we need to accept risk (and ignore the naysayers)—a very much promotion-minded strategy for achieving success. But not everyone agrees:
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
—Andrew Grove, former CEO, Intel
While most prevention-minded individuals would prefer not to think of themselves as “paranoid,” they would wholeheartedly agree with Grove’s overall argument. Perhaps better to say, “Only the vigilant survive.” Complacency (which we can all agree is a bad thing) is a mistake that must be avoided—a successful company doesn’t get too cocky or comfortable with its own success. It cannot afford to relax and give its competitors a chance to catch up, and it has to imagine the competitors out there who are just waiting to take advantage of the company that fails to maintain its market position (the kind of imagining called “paranoid”).
So now you may be thinking, “Hang on, they can’t both be right, can they?” Well, the answer is yes and no. As we’ve argued, every organization needs the strengths of both the promotion- and the prevention-focused to succeed. But research suggests that there are circumstances under which one leadership style is more effective than the other. The key to knowing which will work best is understanding your organization’s (or industry’s) operating environment—is it relatively stable or dynamic?
In a stable environment, customers have predictable preferences. You know what they want, and you are pretty sure you know what they’ll want tomorrow and the next day, too. There are minimal changes in technology, and those changes are slow in coming. And you know your competition—you know precisely what you are up against. For example, the Coca-Cola Company has been operating in a relatively stable environment for decades. People want soft drinks—and they will want them for the foreseeable future. Changes in the way soft drinks are produced and distributed have been gradual. And its top competitor is still PepsiCo, as it has been for most of the last century. (Together, the two companies have captured over 70 percent of the U.S. soft drink market.)
A dynamic environment, on the other hand, is in a state of more-or-less constant flux. Customers’ tastes change overnight—they are always looking for the next big thing. Competitors rise and fall so rapidly, you aren’t sure who’ll be left standing a year from now. Technology becomes clunky and obsolete soon after you take it out of the box. (A friend of ours has a cell phone he bought four years ago that is just a phone. No camera, no Web access—it simply makes and receives calls. His friends routinely marvel at it like it’s a relic of our distant past, found somewhere deep in a cave with arrowheads and broken clay pots.)
If your company operates in a dynamic industry, you have to respond rapidly and in innovative ways to keep ahead. And as a recent study of CEOs at small firms showed, strongly promotion-focused CEOs perform especially well in periods of high dynamism. Their particular strengths (e.g., acting quickly, taking chances, generating creative alternatives) are essentials in an unpredictable and ever-changing climate. Not surprisingly, prevention-focused CEOs are particularly ineffective in this kind of environment. But they are much more effective than promotion-focused CEOs in more stable industries, where the key to success is often avoiding catastrophic errors (New Coke, anyone?).8
One of the most important take-home messages from this book is that there are two completely legitimate ways of looking at the same goal. You may think your business needs to focus on creating new opportunities, while your colleague thinks you need to be focused on protecting your relationships with existing clients—and you are both right! Each of you may think that your approach is more essential, more of a top priority, than the other’s—and you would both be wrong. Teams composed of both promotion- and prevention-focused people are crucial for every organization’s success, but there is also the potential for infighting and poor communication.
The key is to cast aside the notion that one approach—one motivational focus—is better or more important than the other. Just as human beings need both nurturance and safety to thrive, businesses (and teams) need to excel at innovation and maintenance, at speed and accuracy. To do that, we need to respect the perspectives and contributions of both our promotion colleagues and our prevention colleagues, and to be grateful that the strengths of those with one focus can complement so effectively the strengths of those with the other focus. We can’t imagine a Motivation Science Center without members like Ray and Jon, inspiring us to dream big without neglecting the details.