I want to be busy: Instrumental regulation of busyness among conscientious individuals

• Main Author: KOH, Brandon
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Affect regulation; busyness; conscientiousness; instrumental emotion regulation; trait-consistent affect; Applied Behavior Analysis; Cognitive Psychology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/211; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1211&context=etd_coll
• Institution: Singapore Management University

A sense of busyness, the subjective feeling of having a long and effortful work schedule, is increasingly prevalent in today’s societies. Although people commonly feel busy because of externally imposed work pressures, the motivated self-regulation perspective suggests that people might intentionally put themselves in a busy state for instrumental reasons. Grounded in the instrumental emotion regulation framework, this research theorizes that people instrumentally regulate themselves to experience busyness – a negative affect – to facilitate a performance motive. In other words, people might desire to feel busyness despite its unpleasant hedonic tone in order to attain higher performance. Results from three studies support the hypotheses that busyness is experienced as a trait-consistent experience for conscientious individuals, and that they will comparatively perform better under higher levels of busyness. Across three studies, conscientious individuals consistently exhibit a higher preference for busyness. In turn, they tend to self-regulate towards busyness in preparation for challenging tasks (Study 1). Experimental studies further showed that conscientious individuals exhibit better cognitive performance under higher (vs. lower) perceived workload (Study 2) and under higher (vs. lower) levels of busyness experienced in the real world (Study 3). Importantly, these performance benefits are unique to those with an autonomous preference for busyness, but not those who feel compelled by workaholism. The potential contributions and implications are discussed.