Selecting the Good vs. Rejecting the Bad: Regulatory Focus Effects on Staffing Decision Making

Abstract

Although staffing decisions are typically conceptualized as motivated by the desire to select the best employees, many managers and human resources practitioners may be more concerned with avoiding bad hires. Regulatory focus theory provides a rich and well-developed framework for understanding how prevention and promotion orientations shape judgments and decisions. This work is the first to examine this theory's implications for understanding staffing, and it illustrates how these fundamental underlying motivations alter the salience of costs and benefits associated with staffing practices, as well as subjective judgments about individual applicants. Regulatory focus is a function of situational factors as well as individual differences, and predominant motivational orientations also vary with business cycles. This model therefore offers broad cross-level explanatory power for understanding dynamic factors influencing staffing, as well as a novel perspective on ways to improve the quality of staffing decision making. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.