Performance Benefits of Employees’ Own and Their Coworkers’ Nonlimited Willpower Beliefs

Abstract

The limited-resource perspective provides a primary account of whether people fail to keep persistent in the face of difficulties. A well-documented idea is that any act of self-control efforts will consume people’s willpower (i.e., their capacity to exert self-control) and impair their further self-regulation attempts in persistence. Extending this limited-resource perspective, the present research first brings in implicit theories about willpower to the work context by arguing that whether people believe willpower is a limited or nonlimited resource will affect their job persistence and subsequent job performance. By examining one’s own and interpersonal influence of implicit willpower beliefs, we explore how focal employees’ and coworkers’ willpower beliefs, respectively, affect focal employees’ job performance. Specifically, focal employees’ willpower belief affects job performance through job persistence. In parallel, to examine how coworkers’ willpower belief influences focal employees’ job performance, we theorize a behavioral contagion process whereby coworkers’ job persistence triggered by their willpower belief can be learned by the focal employee to exhibit job persistence themselves, which in turn increases job performance. Further, we theorize that such behavioral contagion effect is stronger when there is lower variance of coworkers’ job persistence. Results based on two multi-wave, multi-source field studies provide consistent support for our hypotheses. We discuss how our findings contribute to the literatures on implicit theories about willpower and behavioral contagion, and provide practical implications for organizations.