When to Approach and When to Avoid? Functional Flexibility Is the Key

Abstract

In the target article, Scholer, Cornwell, and Higgins (this issue) put forward a dynamic, nuanced approach to the study of motivation. In explicating the complexities of motivation and strategies derived therefrom, they formulate a self-regulatory hierarchy based on an extensive literature review and the collation of empirical evidence. Their article is brimful of insights into the motivation literature, particularly the widely held belief about the adaptiveness of approach (vs. avoidance) motivation. In their view, no single type of motivation-driven strategy is inherently adaptive or maladaptive. Rather, adaptiveness depends largely on whether the implemented strategy is aligned with one’s goals and the specific demands of the situation in which implementation takes place. Such alignment plays a pivotal role in determining strategy effectiveness, and in our opinion this issue constitutes the “meat” of their work. However, the target article focuses primarily on delineating the authors’ proposed self-regulatory hierarchy, with insufficient coverage devoted to stipulating the circumstances in which the aforementioned alignment is attained. Our aim in this commentary is to expand their work by digging into this important but unexplored issue in an endeavor to identify the elements that are crucial to effective strategy implementation.