Preventing success: How a prevention focus causes leaders to overrule good ideas and reduce team performance gains.

What is it about?

We take a team-based perspective to investigate how a leader’s prevention focus influences both their own actions in overruling good decisions by the team and the team’s own processes and states which reduce their performance.

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Photo by janilson furtado on Unsplash

Photo by janilson furtado on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We introduce the construct of harmful overruling to the team leadership and leader regulatory focus literatures and demonstrate the unintended negative effects of leader prevention focus in their mistakenly changing teams’ correct decisions. We also help explain the negative effects of leader prevention focus on collective team performance through three specific team processes and states - increased team risk avoidance, reduced team prospecting for opportunities, and lower positive team affective tone