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Natural environments and imagery are known to have a myriad of effects on people’s physical and psychological states. However, little is known about how exposure to nature-related imagery can influence consumers’ motivational states. This research investigates the effect of exposure to nature on consumers’ regulatory focus. More specifically, this paper proposes that consumers exposed to nature will exhibit stronger promotion-oriented focus and weaker prevention-oriented focus, and as such, these consumers will prefer promotion-framed marketing messages over prevention-framed ones. This paper aims to explore a mediating mechanism and a boundary condition for this effect.

A series of six experiments, including an Implicit Association Test, examined the effect of exposure to images of natural objects and scenes (in contrast with non-nature imagery) on consumers’ regulatory focus and whether they experienced regulatory fit when encountering promotion-framed (vs prevention-framed) advertising messages.

The results revealed that consumers exhibited lower prevention-focused and higher promotion-focused motivational orientation after exposure to nature. Furthermore, exposure to nature led consumers to experience more regulatory fit with promotion-oriented marketing messages than prevention-oriented ones. This study found that natural environments offer urban consumers a reprieve from their day-to-day life, which mediates the effect of exposure to nature on regulatory focus. This study investigated the boundary condition of engaging in maintenance of nature (e.g. mow the grass) in which the effects of nature on regulatory focus were attenuated.

This study used text and pictures related to nature as a way to expose the online participants to nature. Future research may use field studies with participants in real natural settings, with expectation of stronger effects. Second, this study examined mostly urban American participants. There may be cultural differences or living situations (e.g. living “off the grid” and in the “wild”) that influence people’s relationship with nature. Future research may examine how these differences can affect the influence of exposure to nature on motivational orientation.

The findings have direct implications for marketing managers and other related stakeholders. Exposing urban consumers to nature – even images of nature – they become more receptive to promotion-framed advertisements and marketing communications (vs prevention-framed messaging).

Little is currently known about how exposure to nature can influence psychological processes such as motivational orientation. This research contributes to the understanding of consumers’ responses to nature-related imagery in advertising and the effect that nature imagery has on consumers’ motivational orientation. This research also contributes to the body of work on regulatory focus by identifying a novel context in which consumers’ motivational orientation can be influenced.

This study aims to investigate the fit of a promotion (prevention) focus with malicious (benign) envy and how this fit influences positive and negative behaviours, depending on the context.

Four empirical studies (two laboratory and two online experiments) were used to test key hypotheses. Study 1 manipulated regulatory focus and envy in a job application setting with university students. Study 2 engaged similar manipulations in a social media setting. Studies 3 and 4 extended the regulatory focus and envy manipulations to the general population in pay-what-you-want (PWYW) and pay-it-forward (PIF) restaurant contexts.

The findings showed that a promotion (prevention) focus fits with the emotion of malicious (benign) envy. In the social media context, promotion and prevention foci demonstrated negative behaviour, including unfollowing the envied person, when combined with malicious and benign envy. In the PWYW and PIF contexts, combining envy with a specific type of regulatory focus encouraged both positive and negative behaviours through influencing payments.

Future research could validate and extend this study’s findings with different product/service categories, cross-cultural samples and research methods such as field experiments.

The four studies’ findings will assist managers in formulating marketing strategies to enhance their positioning of target products/services, possibly leading to higher prices for PWYW and PIF businesses.

The conceptual model is novel as, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior research has proposed and tested the fit between envy type and regulatory foci.

This study aims to examine the impact of the regulatory focus of the top management team (TMT) members on the technological diversification of firms in high-technology industries based on the upper echelons theory and regulatory focus theory and explore the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty.

This paper uses data on the Chinese Growth Enterprises Market Board (GEM)-listed companies from 2012 to 2016. The authors collected data on TMT regulatory focus from firms’ annual reports by Python programming. A fixed-effects model was used to test our hypotheses.

Results indicate that TMTs with a high promotion focus are associated with greater technological diversification, while TMTs with a high prevention focus are linked to lower technological diversification. Moreover, environmental uncertainty amplifies the positive relationship between promotion-focused TMTs and technological diversification, while it diminishes the negative relationship between prevention-focused TMTs and technological diversification.

This study is limited to high-technology firms listed on the Chinese GEM, which may restrict the generalizability of the findings. Future research could validate these results in different countries and industries to enhance their robustness. Additionally, this study focuses on the impact of TMT regulatory focus on technological diversification; future studies could explore its influence on other strategic decisions, such as digital transformation or innovation strategies.

The results suggest that firms should carefully consider the regulatory focus of their TMT when making strategic decisions regarding technological diversification. Boards of directors should ensure that the TMT’s regulatory focus aligns with the firm’s strategic objectives, particularly in high-technology industries. Moreover, firms should adapt their strategies to the level of environmental uncertainty to better navigate the risks and opportunities presented by a dynamic market environment.

Supportive evidence allows authors to discuss how our findings contribute to the upper echelons theory, as well as the emerging stream of firm technological diversification, which provided valuable psychological insights into the factors influencing TMT strategic decision-making. Meanwhile, this paper integrates the factors of the industry macro-environment to explore the changes in the TMT regulatory focus on firm technological diversification under different contexts.

How can we better help consumers deal with threats to satisfying their basic motivational needs? When people fail to meet their fundamental needs for value, truth, and control effectiveness, they feel threatened. Are there products and services that can help consumers with these vulnerabilities? Based on a new 2 (prevention value vs. promotion value) × 2 (truth vs. control) motivated activity framework, we argue that different types of motivational threats produce distinct experiences of vulnerability, each of which can be resolved by engaging in unique compensatory activities. This proposal is especially relevant to marketers because brands can use this knowledge to create and promote product and service offerings that directly address these distinct kinds of vulnerability. In this review, we discuss four specific types of consumer threats and examples of branded solutions. We also suggest implications for marketers and open questions that warrant future research.

Leaders are role models and through social influence processes, they shape the behaviour of their followers. We build on social learning, social identity and person-environment (P-E) fit theories of leadership to explore the association between leaders’ and followers’ resilient behaviours.

In a three-wave, multisource study amongst 269 Dutch leaders and their followers, we investigate the mediating role of coaching in the relationship between leaders’ resilient behaviour and followers’ resilient behaviour and the moderating role of regulatory focus in this mediation path.

Our results show that coaching is a key relational vehicle through which leaders’ resilient behaviours shape employees’ resilient behaviours, and this indirect association is stronger for employees scoring low on promotion focus. In addition, our results show that resilient employees attract more coaching from their leaders, which further strengthens their resilient behaviours.

Existing studies have shown the occurrence of trickle-down effects of various leader behaviours, moods and work states on those of their followers. However, it remained obscure whether leaders’ resilient behaviour could trickle down to followers’ as well. Our study shows that such a link indeed exists and that coaching is a relational vehicle that embodies two key mechanisms to (1) foster social learning through behavioural entrainment and contagion and (2) facilitate support provision through which leaders promote resilient behaviour in their followers.

The purpose of this study is to examine tacit knowledge sharing within information systems development (ISD) projects by exploring the combination of social interdependence theory and regulatory focus theory (RFT).

A survey was conducted on 198 ISD professionals to investigate the effect of social interdependence on tacit knowledge sharing. The survey data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), and the results were discussed.

This study reveals that team members tend to share tacit knowledge in a way characterized by cooperative interdependence, and different patterns of social interdependence have an impact on tacit knowledge sharing. The RFT explains the disparities in attitude toward tacit knowledge sharing. Specifically, individuals with a prevention-focused orientation positively moderate the impact of competitive interdependence on tacit knowledge sharing, while those with a promotion-focused orientation have a negative moderating effect on the effect of competitive interdependence on tacit knowledge sharing. Moreover, promotion-focused individuals negatively moderate the effect of cooperative interdependence on tacit knowledge sharing.

The study identifies important aspects of social interdependence in ISD projects that affect the management of tacit knowledge. Furthermore, the study shows that the influence of cooperative and competitive interdependence on tacit knowledge sharing is moderated by the regulatory focus of an individual, providing new insights into ISD knowledge management.

This study aims to address the question of why managers make different decisions in employee downsizing when their firms face external threats. Our research intends to shed light on whether and how CEOs' cognition (motivational attributes associated with regulatory focus) influences their decision-making and firms’ strategic actions on downsizing under high resource scarcity in the industry environment.

We used a longitudinal panel of 5,544 firm-year observations of US firms from 2003 to 2015 to test our conceptual model. The data was obtained from various sources, including corporate earnings call transcripts and archival databases. We used panel logistic regressions with both fixed and random effects in our research design.

Our results suggest that CEOs' motivational attributes could influence their employee downsizing decisions in response to external threats. We find that CEOs who are more promotion-focused (a stronger drive towards achieving ideals) are less likely to lay off employees during high resource scarcity. Conversely, CEOs with a higher prevention focus (a greater concern for security) do not have a meaningful impact on employee downsizing during periods of external resource scarcity.

Previous research has argued that a significant external threat would diminish individuals' impact on firm strategies and outcomes. Our findings challenge this idea, indicating that CEOs with a stronger drive towards achieving ideals are less inclined to lay off employees when resources are scarce in the environment. This study contributes to behavioral strategy research by providing new insights into how upper echelons’ cognition can influence their decision-making and firms’ employee downsizing.

This study aims to examine the effects of organizational polychronicity on individual adaptive performance. Drawing on conservation of resources theory and the perspective of individual differences in pressure perceptions, this study develops a conceptual model to test the mediating role of time pressure and the moderating role of trait regulatory focus in the relationship between organizational polychronicity and individual adaptive performance.

A three-wave survey was conducted to investigate a sample of 591 employees who engaged in innovative activities in China. The hypotheses were tested using hierarchical multiple regression and bootstrapping.

The results show that organizational polychronicity is negatively related to individual adaptive performance via time pressure. Promotion focus weakens the positive relationship between organizational polychronicity and time pressure and the mediating role of time pressure, while prevention focus augments the positive relationship between organizational polychronicity and time pressure and the mediating role of time pressure.

This study reveals the mediating role of time pressure in the relationship between organizational polychronicity and individual adaptive performance, as well as the moderating role of trait regulatory focus in this relationship, thereby deepening our understanding of organizational polychronicity from both a theoretical and a practical perspective.

In the prior literature, the motivation to adopt wearable fitness technology (WFT) has been linked with either intrinsic or extrinsic. However, how the subcategories of extrinsic motivations (identified, introjected and external) affect the consumers’ WFT adoption decision remains sparse. Furthermore, do regulatory focus (prevention vs promotion) and gender differences the effects of different motivations on WFT adoption is almost unknown in the health-care marketing literature. This study aims to fill the above-mentioned gap and to unfold the WFT adoption beyond the traditional motivation by incorporating the organismic integration theory (part of self-determined theory) and regulatory focus theory.

This study used a questionnaire-based survey. Using the “AMOS” survey, questionnaire responses of 641 respondents were analyzed and validated by using structural equation modeling. All the variables were adopted from the literature.

The results show that intrinsic, identified and external motivations have the greatest impact on consumers’ decisions, while introjected motivation was not significant directly. The moderation effects of regulatory focus are significant in such a way that prevention focus influences the introjected motivation and promotion focus affects the external motivation and WFT adoption decision. Furthermore, the findings on gender moderation suggest that women are more intrinsically motivated, and men are more externally motivated for WFT adoption.

The new insights and contributions of this study provide a better understanding of WFT adoption and help sellers develop more effective marketing strategies.

This study incorporates subcategories of extrinsic motivations to provide a deeper understanding of consumers’ behavior. Furthermore, this study applies a unique framework of organismic integration theory to consumers’ WFT adoption. It is also among very few research that investigate regulatory focus and gender impact on consumers’ WFT adoption.

The purpose of this study is to reveal the mechanism of humble leadership inducing abusive supervision from the low-status compensation perspective, examining the mediation role of leader perceived thread to status. Besides, the moderation effect of regulatory focus on the mediation path is discussed.

This study conducted a three-wave longitudinal survey. The data was collected from 438 leaders and their employees in five Chinese enterprises. This study used Mplus 7.4 and adopted a bootstrapping technique for data analysis.

Humble leadership has a positive effect on leader perceived threat to status. Leader perceived threat to status plays a mediation role between humble leadership and leader abusive supervision. Leader regulatory focus is the “gate valve” that humble leadership fosters leader abusive supervision. That is, when the leader promotion focus is high, leader perceived threat to status bred by humble leadership is low, resulting in less abusive supervision. When the leader prevention focus is high, humble leadership brings relatively more abusive supervision through perceived threat to status.

This study explores why humble leadership breeds abusive supervision behaviors and reveals the mechanism behind the negative effect of humble leadership based on low-status compensation theory. This study not only promotes the continuous development of the field of humble leadership research through empirical research but also provides guidance for effectively suppressing the negative effects of humble leadership, promoting strengths and avoiding weaknesses and suppressing inappropriate management behaviors in management practice.