Just do it or do it right? How regulatory mode relates to perceived responsibility and opportunity in collaborations

Abstract

In many contexts, people collaborate with others to complete tasks. Collaboration provides opportunities to achieve goals (e.g., to combine expertise and split workload), but also responsibilities to ensure that things go well (e.g., that work assignments are appropriate and that different contributions are taken into account). Successful collaboration likely requires both types of individuals—those who consider the opportunities and those who recognize the responsibilities. But how can these people be identified? The present research studied the role of people's regulatory mode as predisposing them to focus on the opportunity or responsibility of collaboration. Going beyond prior work, we predicted that a locomotion mode to “move on” towards desired outcomes would primarily be associated with perceiving collaboration as an opportunity to do so; in contrast, an assessment mode to evaluate how to “do things right” should be linked to perceiving collaboration primarily as a responsibility. Seven studies (N = 1318) across multiple study contexts found meta-analytical evidence for the predicted relations (more so than for alternative relations). Accordingly, the way in which people typically regulate behavior towards desired end-states contributes to understanding how they likely perceive (and potentially engage in) collaborations with others.