Going for it on Fourth Down: Rivalry Increases Risk Taking, Physiological Arousal, and Promotion Focus
通过NFL数据分析和实验室实验，发现与竞争对手互动会增加冒险行为，其机制是增强促进焦点和生理唤醒，对理解组织中的竞争决策有重要意义。
Risk taking is fundamental to organizational decision making. Extending prior work that has identified individual and situational antecedents of risk taking, we explore a significant relational antecedent: rivalry. In both a field setting and a laboratory experiment, we explore how a competitor’s identity and relationship with the decision maker influences risk taking. We analyze play-by-play archival data from the National Football League and find that interactions with rival (versus nonrival) partners increases risky behavior. In a laboratory experiment involving face-to-face competition, we demonstrate that rivalry increases risk taking via two pathways: increased promotion focus and physiological arousal. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating relational characteristics to understand risk taking. Our findings also advance our understanding of when and why competition promotes risk taking, and underscore the importance of identity and relationships in the psychology and physiology of competitive decision making in organizations.