Individual Antecedents: The Role of Promotion vs. Prevention Focus Mindsets
Stereotypes and anecdotal evidence of the legal profession describe lawyers as mainly focusing on preventing negative outcomes for their companies rather than searching for business opportunities: “As a lawyer, a big part of your job is to forecast every conceivable thing that can go wrong for your client, then protect against it.
To remove ambiguity and uncertainty. With whatever time you’ve got left, you focus on putting the legal structure in place to maximize the upside. But that’s nearly always second to protecting against the downside.” (Fields 2013, para. 7). This focus, of course, stems from lawyers’ education and their primary tasks in business, i.e., advising internal clients and mitigating commercial risks.However, if legal departments want to substantially contribute to business value, they need to think and act entrepreneurially, which involves acting proactively and opportunity-focused in accordance to their clients’ business needs. The distinction between a focus on security and (potential) losses vs. riskiness and (potential) gains has been shown to be a central part of individuals’ mindsets in research on regulatory focus theory (Higgins 2006).
Regulatory focus theory posits that individuals use two different mindsets to guide their behavior: promotion vs. prevention focus (Higgins 1998). In a promotion focus, individuals concentrate on gains, advancement, growth, and positive outcomes. They act with an open mindset toward novel opportunities, consider
| Promotion focus | Prevention focus | |
| Underlying motives | Advancement, growth, and accomplishment | Security, safety, and responsibility |
| Goals or standards | Maximal goals: hopes and ideals | Minimal goals: duties and obligations |
| Salient outcomes | Attaining hits and avoiding misses | Attaining correct rejections and avoiding false alarms |
| Means | Eagerness means | Vigilance means |
Fig.
1 Dimensions of regulatory focus theory (Higgins 1997): promotion vs. prevention focus. Reprinted from the Journal of Business Venturing, 27, 622-636, A. Tumasjan & R. Braun, “In the eye of the beholder: How regulatory focus and self-efficacy interact in influencing opportunity recognition”, Copyright 2012, with permission from Elsevier
many different alternatives, and “think big”. In contrast, in a prevention focus, individuals concentrate on losses, security, safety, and negative outcomes. They exhibit high vigilance, are prone to behave and think conservatively, and focus on details and accurateness (Halvorson and Higgins 2013). Individuals act in both mindsets—depending on the task and situation—but usually, one of the mindsets is dominant. The difference between promotion and prevention focus are summarized in Fig. 1.
Research examining the influence of regulatory focus on (work) behavior generally demonstrates that a promotion focus is associated with innovation, creativity, opportunity recognition, and change-related organizational citizenship behaviors. In contrast, a prevention focus is associated with safety behaviors, risk-aversion, and maintenance-related organizational citizenship behaviors (e.g., Lanaj et al. 2012; Strobel et al. 2013). Moreover, it has been shown that it is a promotion focus rather than prevention focus that positively influences entrepreneurial behavior, and in particular the recognition of novel business opportunities (Hmieleski and Baron 2008; Tumasjan and Braun 2012).
Although promotion and prevention focus are stable individual characteristics, they still can be influenced situationally to a certain extent. In this vein, leadership behavior and team climates play an important role in shaping employees promotion and prevention focused behavior (e.g., Neubert et al. 2008; Wallace and Chen 2006). A teams' group climate for safety (i.e., an emphasis on safety rules and regulations) has shown to significantly increase employees prevention focus (Wallace and Chen 2006).
Moreover, leaders' promotion vs. prevention focus also influences employee behavior independent from employees' stable regulatory focus. In a study by Wu et al. (2008), leaders' promotion focus instilled promotion- focused behavior in their employees fostering employees' creative behavior (Tang et al. 2015). Overall, the extent to which individuals act in a promotion vs. prevention focused mindset depends not only on their stable characteristics but also on situational cues within the organization. In sum, all these findings imply that firms have the possibility to influence their employees’ promotion vs. prevention focus mindsets at work through leadership and team climate. In turn, promotion vs. prevention focus will influence how employees approach and accomplish their work.For legal departments in particular, these findings offer concrete managerial implications. First, leadership in legal teams has to balance promotion and prevention-focused behaviors. Usually, legal teams will focus on the prevention and safety side when giving legal advice to their internal clients. However, leaders need to make their team members aware of the importance of promotion-focused thinking when working with clients. That does not imply that legal department employees have to solely act in a promotion-focused way. Rather it is important that depending on the stage or situation of internal client advice, promotion and prevention-focused thinking need to be balanced. For instance, in contract management, internal clients (e.g., sales) will, due to their role and incentive structure, focus on the opportunities that a certain deal will create for the company. In contrast, the legal employees’ role is to focus on the risks and problems that a contract may create. In such situations, legal department leaders may encourage their employees to think proactively about the best ways of value creation with the client rather than focusing exclusively on “what may go wrong”. Moreover, a proactive, promotion-focused approach may involve by searching for further opportunities for value creation that the internal client may have overlooked.
Thus, rather than only securing against “errors of commission” (i.e., making mistakes), legal employees may create additional value by ensuring “errors of omission” (i.e., losing potential gains from a deal; Crowe and Higgins 1997).Second, legal managers’ leadership behavior will influence the extent to which legal department employees will act promotion-focused, and, in turn, entrepreneur- ially or opportunity-oriented. Leaders thus need to act as role models for opportunity-focused behavior to encourage employees to think in terms of value creation rather than “merely” avoiding mistakes or risks associated with business deals. By their role modeling, leaders’ open-minded, promotion-focused mindset will transfer to their employees and instill a stronger focus on finding opportunities and different alternatives for legal departments’ internal clients. There exist a variety of training methods for fostering a promotion focus in individuals which may be readily applied by leaders and employees alike (Halvorson and Higgins 2013). Training interventions may use techniques such as focusing on the gains (rather than only the losses) that can be obtained by a project, concentrating on one’s future aspirations or making lists of the positive sides of envisioned goals (e.g., providing a new service) to enhance promotion focus (see Halvorson and Higgins 2013; Strobel et al. 2016).
Third, acting in a promotion-focused way also means being open to change and embracing innovations. Stereotypically, both managers and employees of legal departments are usually not known as being technological early adopters or proponents of change. However, especially in times of rapid technological developments (e.g., digitization), a promotion-focused attitude in legal departments is important to keep abreast of and implement technological innovations for legal issues (e.g., automatization of contract management or more generally innovations under the label of “Legal Tech”). Importantly, a promotion focus positively influences such behaviors—termed proactive strategic scanning—i.e.
“proactively surveying the organization’s environment to identify ways to ensure a fit between the organization and its environment, such as identifying ways the organization might respond to emerging markets or actively searching the environment for future organizational threats and opportunities” (Parker and Collins 2010, p. 637). Thus, adopting a promotion-focused mindset may encourage employees to proactively search and make suggestions for implementation of legal innovations that will contribute to increased productivity and, ultimately, to business success.Finally, in leading legal teams it is advisable to cultivate both high promotion and prevention orientation depending on the issue or phase at hand. Maintaining both orientations concurrently may be considered a form of ambidexterity. Ambidexterity—a concept that was initially used to describe the ability to equally use both the left and the right hand—has been introduced to explain the creation and management of innovations (Raisch and Birkinshaw 2008). Proponents of the ambidexterity concept argue that for organizations to foster innovations both exploitation (i.e., focus on refining existing solutions) and exploration (i.e., search for novel solutions) are important for successful innovation. Similarly, managers and employees of legal departments should strive for mastering promotion and prevention focused acting to create business value. To achieve ambidexterity, organizations or teams can use two basic approaches: structural ambidexterity or contextual ambidexterity (Raisch and Birkinshaw 2008). Transferred to our example of legal teams, structural ambidexterity may involve creating separate groups of individuals or teams that follow a promotion vs. prevention-oriented work style. Thus, when cooperating and coordinating, the promotion-focused groups may counterbalance the prevention-oriented individuals in decision-making. On the other hand, contextual ambidexterity refers to switching between a promotion vs.
prevention focus within one team or individual. Thus, this approach requires managers and employees to achieve both high promotion and prevention focus simultaneously and switch between both depending on the situation. Recently, research has shown that ambidextrous leadership, i.e., leading in a way that highly encourages both a) behaviors that are related to experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking (i.e., promotion-focused behaviors) as well as b) behaviors related to sticking to plans, routine behaviors, and attention to mistakes (i.e., prevention- focused behaviors) fosters team innovation (Zacher and Rosing 2015). This finding implies that it is both possible and advisable for leaders to achieve high levels of both orientations and switch between them to foster innovative behaviors.The extent to which individuals/teams have a promotion and prevention focus at work can readily be measured by existing assessment instruments. For this purpose, Wallace et al. (2009) have developed the regulatory focus at work scale, a survey instrument that assesses promotion and prevention focus at work with 12 Likert- style questions. Using this instrument, teams can assess the degree to which the two mindsets are pronounced in their members' work behaviors and thus have a starting basis for a discussion about potential change opportunities.
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