Enacting Change in Strategic Marketing Decisions: The Role of Regulatory Focus in Teams

The ability to enact change underlies long-term marketing success. We examine how individual and leadership motivations influence a team’s propensity to enact change across a variety of marketing decisions. We utilize regulatory focus theory and identify the effects of regulatory focus match vs. mismatch within teams on the propensity to enact change in decision-making across the marketing mix. We find that regulatory focus match renders leadership-prescribed goal pursuit strategies ineffective and that only teams under regulatory focus mismatch make decisions consistent with leadership-prescribed goal pursuit strategies. For regulatory match teams, our results demonstrate that a promotion focus is associated with greater levels of change in team marketing decisions than a prevention focus.