Counteracting threat bias: A longitudinal field experiment testing two interventions that expand managerial attention to opportunities under economic threat.
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: When economic threat is salient, managers focus on preventing losses and neglect the opportunities adaptation requires, a pattern termed threat bias. On the prevailing view, managerial attention is limited so that attention to threat comes at the expense of attention to opportunity: Restoring it means perceiving less threat or relaxing vigilance, and the remedy has been to divide the orientations across people or units. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, in which promotion and prevention are independent systems, I propose instead that threat bias reflects a situational construal: Salient threat makes prevention cues dominant, while promotion cues lie dormant, so their relation is not fixed. I test this with two brief construal-shaping interventions, one highlighting opportunities (opportunity) and one highlighting opportunities and threats (balanced), in a five-wave field experiment with 414 managers during the COVID-19 downturn, with voice rated by higher level managers blind to condition. Among unexposed managers, within-person increases in perceived threat were associated with lower promotion focus and opportunity-related voice, the threat-bias pattern. Both interventions weakened that association and raised promotion focus and opportunity-related voice relative to control, under sustained economic threat. The balanced intervention also increased prevention focus and threat-related voice; the opportunity intervention changed neither. Mean perceived threat was unchanged: The interventions altered how managers responded to threat, not how much threat they perceived. Intervention effects on voice grew over 3 months. Threat bias therefore reflects how managers construe the situation rather than an unavoidable trade-off between the orientations, and both can be raised in the same managers at once. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Source: Journal of Applied Psychology
DOI: 10.1037/apl0001436
Author: Nina Sirola
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7202103093