Are you all about delayed gratification, or would you rather get while the getting’s good? According to a new study, published in Psychological Science, your answer may be an indication of your corporate wellness, as future benefits are favoured by those who feel powerful and in control of their situation, while feeling powerless seems to make you want to ‘take it while it’s available’.
This tendency to choose short-term smaller gains over future bigger gains is called ‘temporal discounting’. For example, you may choose to accept £100 today instead of £110 in a month’s time or, if you’re a smoker, you may take a cigarette right now instead of waiting for two cigarette you’ll get two weeks from now. USC Marshall School of Business researchers Priyanka Joshi, a doctoral candidate in management and organisation, and Nathanael Fast, an assistant professor of management and organisation, decided to investigate how temporal discounting impacts your corporate wellbeing.
According to Joshi, ‘Consistent with our predictions, we found that feeling powerful actually increased people’s willingness to wait for larger rewards’. This means that enhancing your feeling of authority might may you put off small, immediate gains, and instead focus on larger, future benefits. The researchers found that experiencing power in the workplace has a positive correlation with your total accrued assets, meaning that you’re more likely to save up for the future because you feel more in touch with your future self.
Fast explained, ‘Power provides control over future outcomes, so the future seems more certain when you feel powerful. You’re therefore more likely to expand your sense of self to include your future self and, as a result, consider long-term consequences when making decisions.’ One thing the investigators did was to ask participants to think back to a time in the past when they felt powerful. This helped to generate similar feelings of wellbeing in the present, which enabled the participants to reduce their temporal discounting behaviours.
Joshi commented, ‘Of course, the best way for organisations to make their employees feel powerful is to actually give them more power.’ Fast added, ‘Our research doesn’t mean that power holders are always going to make the best decisions. Power also leads to greater risk-taking, illusory control, and heightened reward sensitivity, all tendencies that can lead to dis-inhibition and poor decision making. Yet, power holders do often make good decisions and they may be particularly good at considering future consequences.’