Looking forward or backward: A temporal lens to disentangle adaptive and maladaptive reactions to daily goal-performance discrepancy.
研究员工如何应对日常目标未达成，发现前瞻性思维能减少次日差距，而反刍会加剧差距，且员工的时间焦点（关注未来或过去）调节了这两种反应路径。
The fast-changing work environment has created growing hindrances to employee daily goal pursuits and rendered it not uncommon for employees to leave work with unachieved daily work goals. The significant ramifications of unachieved goals on employee well-being and performance thus call for more research efforts to understand how employees respond to unsatisfactory goal progress (e.g., goal-performance discrepancy [GPD]). Interestingly, two paradoxical theoretical perspectives exist on this matter, with the self-regulation perspective suggesting an adaptive feedback loop (i.e., GPD on a given day eventually reduces next-day GPD), whereas the self-focused cognition perspective suggesting a maladaptive feedback loop (i.e., GPD on a given day eventually exacerbates next-day GPD). Taking a temporal lens to integrate these two perspectives, we conducted a daily diary study to map out the self-regulatory cognition mechanisms (i.e., anticipatory thinking) and self-focused cognition mechanisms (i.e., rumination) underlying the feedback loops, and identify employee temporal focus (future and past focuses) as critical cross-level boundary conditions to explain why some react to daily GPD adaptively, whereas others maladaptively. Based on 485 daily reports from 100 work professionals, we revealed that daily GPD at work resulted in reduced next-day GPD via increased after-work anticipatory thinking. Meanwhile, daily GPD also resulted in aggravated next-day GPD via increased after-work rumination. Moreover, employee future focus mitigated the maladaptive cycle, whereas employee past focus hindered the adaptive cycle. Our study thus provides important theoretical and empirical insights into employee goal-pursuit process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).