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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of regulatory focus in sustainable entrepreneurship processes to answer questions on how sustainable entrepreneurs pursue their goals and what motivates them. Knowledge about an entrepreneur’s motivational attribute is essential when trying to understand new venture creation processes. To determine an entrepreneur’s affiliation with one of the two self-regulatory systems, promotion focus and prevention focus, it is helpful to establish whether he or she is motivated by growth and development goals (promotion) or rather by responsibility and security goals (prevention).

In a qualitative study of seven sustainable ventures, two semi-structured interview rounds with 14 founders were conducted. Archival data from internal and external sources were gathered, resulting in more than 80 text documents.

Findings reveal that the self-regulatory focus of sustainable entrepreneurs changes during the entrepreneurial process with regard to the temporal dynamics of motivation. While conceiving ideas, sustainable entrepreneurs engage in a prevention-focused self-regulatory process because social or ecological problems induce them to direct their attention toward sustainable development goals. During rollout, in contrast, they increasingly engage in a promotion-focused self-regulatory process and concentrate more on venture growth goals.

The results highlight the important role of a regulatory fit between key self-regulatory entrepreneurial behaviors and entrepreneurs’ regulatory orientation toward increased motivation and enjoyment when pursuing goals.

This study’s contributions extend and combine the theories of regulatory focus, entrepreneurial motivation, and entrepreneurial processes in the field of sustainable entrepreneurship. They are valuable for understanding the determinants of sustainable entrepreneurial action.

The purpose of this study is to develop a theoretical model that posits locomotion-assessment ambidextrous orientation as predictor of salesperson acquisition–retention ambidexterity, which as a consequence increases sales. The authors drawing on regulatory focus theory and self-regulatory for this propose.

Salespeople involved in the study represent different firms selling a wide variety of food and household products to a wholesaler, which resells them to supermarket chains. The authors collected data from 231 industrial salespeople.

First, salesperson assessment focus amplified locomotion’s effect on acquisition–retention ambidexterity. Second, salespeople increased their performance by implementing an acquisition–retention ambidextrous orientation that balances prospecting for new customers and growing existing customers. Third, findings revealed a mediating effect of ambidextrous orientation on the relationship between regulatory mode and sales performance. Finally, outcomes supported the conditional moderated-mediated effect of regulatory mode in explaining performance through ambidextrous orientation.

Results suggest that salespeople need to equalize their dual orientations in a complementary way to elaborate their selling strategies according to each customer. For example, in an unbalanced orientation, putting high levels of assessment into a sales encounter can reduce the effective and efficient use of time in interacting with customers.

The authors further illustrate the importance of using both locomotion and assessment in attaining sales goals (Pierro et al. 2013). This synergistic effect is known as the complementary hypothesis (Pierro et al., 2006a, 2006b). Each dimension complements the other and has a moderated-mediated effect on performance through acquisition–retention ambidexterity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate consumer responses to company communication of offshoring strategies and tries to discover which psychological mechanisms govern these responses. To do these, the authors examine offshoring strategy communication from the point of view of Regulatory Focus Theory.

The authors tested the hypotheses in two different studies. Study 1 examines the associations between company offshoring motives and consumer’s prevention or promotion inferences about the company’s practices. Study 2 tests if and how the interaction effect between respondents’ self-regulatory focus and the company offshoring motive affects respondents’ attitude toward the offshoring company.

The study demonstrated that each of three offshoring motives activates unique self-regulatory orientations (promotion or prevention focus) in consumers, and regulatory fit positively affects consumer attitudes toward the offshoring company.

Results suggest how to communicate company offshoring decisions to consumers. By trying to instill a particular regulatory focus in the public with their communication tools, companies can create a better match in the public eye, gaining more positive consumer evaluations.

This research shows the mechanisms through which consumers respond differently to specific offshoring motives communicated by a company. By building on psychology theory, the study gains insights into the consumer reactions to company offshoring and, to the knowledge, no research to date has examined these mechanisms.

As hybrid organisations operating at the intersection of opposing institutional logics, social enterprises (SEs) pursue the creation of social value w hile functioning as businesses, which generates tensions between social and business concerns. Limited knowledge exists, however, of how hybridity is managed at the intra-individual level. Drawing on regulatory focus theory (RFT), this paper investigates the role of self-regulation in managing hybridity tensions in SEs.

A multiple-case design is useful in investigating the situated cognitive mechanisms underlying individual self-regulation in the context of managing tensions in SEs. The authors interviewed 22 managers from Belgian SEs that had been active in the home-care sector for at least five years before the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how managers handle the tensions between social and business concerns through self-regulation.

The authors show that managers in SEs experience three forms of tensioning: tensioning as intertwining, tensioning as competition and tensioning as superseding. Managers respond differently to tensions depending on their self-regulatory focus (promotion versus prevention) on social and business goals, and this is reflected in their hybridity practices (entrepreneurship, commercialisation, corporatisation and managerialisation). Informed by both social and business logics, hybridity practices serve as tactics used as part of managers' self-regulation, enabling them to handle tensions.

By studying the interactions between individual cognition and institutional logics, this study contributes to the micro-foundations of institutional logics by revealing the role of self-regulation mechanisms in managing tensions in hybrid organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a research model on Taiwan's National Police Administration setting, extending the theory of planned behavior, reasoned action, and expectancy‐valence, and developing the more neglected aspects of the goal‐setting theory.

Participants were Taiwan's National Police Administration employing 500 full‐time employees. Structural Equation Modeling was used to explore the relationship among regulatory focus, uncertainty towards organizational change, and organizational commitment.

The results were that promotion focus or prevention focus had a significantly positive influence on uncertainty towards organizational change, and only promotion focus had a significantly positive influence on organizational commitment. In addition, uncertainty towards organizational change had a significantly negative influence on organizational commitment. The results supported the significant role of uncertainty towards organizational change as a mediator in the relationship between promotion focus (or prevention focus) and organizational commitment.

The results of the research help fill important research gaps (lack of empirical research and generalization) in the regulatory focus theory literature, clarifying the special role of regulatory focus in a traditional police organization's change processing, and its implications for police officers utilizing a non‐US setting to allow a cross‐cultural examination of regulatory focus theory.

This study aims to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and narcissism, including its possible moderators.

A meta-analytic investigation of 32 studies was conducted to check hypotheses. Both uncorrected sample-size-weighted and corrected sample-size-weighted mean correlation coefficients were calculated. Meta-regression was used to assess moderation from EI and narcissism measures.

The results indicated that the relationship between EI and narcissism varied, depending on how EI and narcissism were constructed and measured. Specifically, EI was positively related to grandiose narcissism (GN) and negatively related to vulnerable narcissism (VN). EI was also positively correlated with “composite measures” of narcissism when the measures focused on GN, and negatively correlated when the measures focused on VN. Furthermore, some EI and narcissism measures moderated the correlation between EI and narcissism.

The current study enriches theory by synthesizing the literature to examine whether, and under which conditions, EI fosters or inhibits narcissism. By using the self-regulatory process of narcissism, carefully considering the multifaceted nature of narcissism and updating more data in the meta-analysis, this study contributes to explaining the inconsistency in the relationship between EI and narcissism.

The purpose of this study is to utilize consumers' regulatory focus as a segmentation variable to understand how and why consumers shift their tendency to prioritize certain apparel attributes.

Six hypotheses are developed and then tested via two experiments. Self-administered online questionnaire is used to collect data from a total of 1,178 participants recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The collected data is analyzed using series of Chi-square tests and ANOVAs.

Results show that promotion-focused (prevention-focused)) consumers are not only more likely to prioritize apparel attributes that ensure the attainment of satisfaction (avoidance of dissatisfaction) but also attach higher monetary value to apparel products bearing such attributes.

Previous studies of apparel attribute prioritization utilized static segmentation variables such as age or gender despite the dynamic nature of attribute prioritization tendency. This study extends the literature by demonstrating the significance of consumers' regulatory focus – a dynamic segmentation variable that has not been studied in the current context.

Under what conditions do entrepreneurs make the sustainable decisions they need to develop socially and environmentally responsible new businesses? Explanations of sustainable decision-making have involved various cognitive features; however, it is not yet clear how they play a role in empirical terms and, moreover, how they combine to induce business decisions based on social, environmental and economic considerations. The purpose of this paper is to explore how five cognitive factors combine and causally connect to produce sustainable decision-making in entrepreneurship.

This study uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to examine the decision-making of 37 sustainable entrepreneurs. It focuses on a substantive conception of entrepreneurial behaviour to uncover the cognitive antecedents underlying entrepreneurial decisions that involve the explicit development and implementation of measures, targets and strategies aimed at improving its impact on people and the environment.

The configurational analysis reveals a typology comprising five combinations of cognitive factors constituting a comprehensive cognitive map of sustainable decision-making in entrepreneurship, namely: purpose-driven, determined; value-based, vacillating; value-based, unintended; single motive, single solution; and purpose-driven, hesitant.

This study demonstrates that no single condition is necessary nor sufficient for triggering decision-making involving social and environmental concerns, revealing five mental models leading to sustainable decision-making. In doing so, this paper responds to recent calls that stress the need for studies capable of uncovering the complex constellation of cognitive factors underlying entrepreneurial sustainable behaviour. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This paper provides a systematic characterization of the cognitive underpinnings of sustainable decision-making and offers a basis for organizing the study of sustainable outcomes and configurations of cognitive antecedents. It reconciles prior efforts aimed at characterizing sustainability decisions in the context of SMEs and new enterprises, challenging current models based on awareness, experience and ethical normative frameworks.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the main and interaction effects of self-rated promotion and prevention regulatory focus on self-rated work performance, emotional exhaustion and sickness absence for managers and non-managers separately. The authors expected that promotion focus relates positively to performance and negatively to sickness absence, while prevention focus relates positively to exhaustion and sickness absence, both for managers and non-managers. Furthermore, the authors expected that promotion focus relates positively to performance but also to exhaustion and sickness absence when prevention focus is high, only for managers (i.e. a manager’s dual regulatory focus can be an effective but also exhausting leadership strategy).

The authors tested the hypotheses via moderated regression analyses among two independent groups, managers (n=241) and non-managers (n=415).

Promotion focus was positively related to managers’ and non-managers’ performance and negatively to non-managers’ sickness absence, while prevention focus did not have any main effects. As expected, managers’ promotion focus was positively related to managers’ sickness absence when managers’ prevention focus was high (i.e. dual regulatory focus). Furthermore, managers’ promotion focus negatively related to managers’ performance when managers’ prevention was high, failing to support the hypothesis.

Promotion focus should be enhanced by organizations among leaders and employees. The authors also cautiously discuss the possibility of interventions comparing a promotion focus with dual-focus training.

The authors contribute to the literature by examining the joint (rather than main) effects of promotion and prevention focus on work behavior and the authors address these links among managers and non-managers.