Self-Control at Work

TLDR

Self‑control is essential in organizations, yet research has largely focused on resource‑depletion theories while overlooking other critical components of the self‑control process. This review seeks to broaden the organizational understanding of self‑control by mapping seven components across activation, exertion, and enactment phases and highlighting gaps in depletion‑based perspectives. The authors employ an integrative self‑control theory framework to systematically review the literature and delineate the seven components within the three phases. The resulting model demonstrates that depletion theories are insufficient and that other components receive inadequate attention, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive view of self‑control.

Abstract

Self-control is an important component of organizational life, with organizational members constantly needing to exert self-control to overcome their desires and achieve long-term goals. Attesting to this importance, much research has focused on why individuals lose self-control and the consequences of self-control failure for individuals and organizations. Unfortunately, this research has overly focused on one component of self-control—resource depletion perspectives (and ego depletion perspectives in particular)—while neglecting other components that play equally important roles in the self-control process. As such, we argue that the organizational literature has failed to appreciate the broader picture of what components are involved in the self-control process, and the extent to which these components are intertwined with organizational phenomenon. In this review, we address these issues by using an integrative self-control theory framework to review the management self-control literature, outlining seven components of self-control within three broad phases of the self-control process (activation, exertion, and enactment). This framework integrates the relevant literature into a larger self-control process model, and highlights concerns with existing depletion perspectives as well as the lack of attention paid to other components in the self-control process. We discuss the implications of these issues for future research on self-control.