The fast-changing work environment has created growing hindrances to employee daily goal pursuits and rendered it not uncommon for employees to leave work with unachieved daily work goals. The significant ramifications of unachieved goals on employee well-being and performance thus call for more research efforts to understand how employees respond to unsatisfactory goal progress (e.g., goal-performance discrepancy [GPD]). Interestingly, two paradoxical theoretical perspectives exist on this matter, with the self-regulation perspective suggesting an adaptive feedback loop (i.e., GPD on a given day eventually reduces next-day GPD), whereas the self-focused cognition perspective suggesting a maladaptive feedback loop (i.e., GPD on a given day eventually exacerbates next-day GPD). Taking a temporal lens to integrate these two perspectives, we conducted a daily diary study to map out the self-regulatory cognition mechanisms (i.e., anticipatory thinking) and self-focused cognition mechanisms (i.e., rumination) underlying the feedback loops, and identify employee temporal focus (future and past focuses) as critical cross-level boundary conditions to explain why some react to daily GPD adaptively, whereas others maladaptively. Based on 485 daily reports from 100 work professionals, we revealed that daily GPD at work resulted in reduced next-day GPD via increased after-work anticipatory thinking. Meanwhile, daily GPD also resulted in aggravated next-day GPD via increased after-work rumination. Moreover, employee future focus mitigated the maladaptive cycle, whereas employee past focus hindered the adaptive cycle. Our study thus provides important theoretical and empirical insights into employee goal-pursuit process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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向前或向后看：用时间透镜来理清对日常目标表现差异的适应性和适应不良反应。

快速变化的工作环境给员工追求日常目标带来了越来越多的障碍，导致员工因未实现日常工作目标而下班的情况并不少见。因此，未实现的目标对员工福祉和绩效的重大影响需要更多的研究工作来了解员工如何应对不令人满意的目标进展（例如，目标绩效差异[GPD]）。有趣的是，在这个问题上存在两种矛盾的理论观点，自我调节观点提出了一个适应性反馈循环（即某一天的 GPD 最终会降低第二天的 GPD），而自我关注的认知观点则提出了一个适应不良的反馈循环（即某一天的 GPD 最终会加剧第二天的 GPD）。从时间角度整合这两个视角，我们进行了日常日记研究，以绘制反馈循环背后的自我调节认知机制（即预期思维）和自我聚焦认知机制（即反思），并识别员工时间焦点（未来和过去的焦点）作为关键的跨级别边界条件来解释为什么有些人对日常 GPD 做出适应性反应，而另一些人则适应不良。根据 100 名职业人士的 485 份每日报告，我们发现，每天工作中的 GPD 通过增加下班后的预期思维而导致第二天的 GPD 降低。与此同时，每天的 GPD 也会因下班后沉思的增加而导致第二天的 GPD 加剧。此外，员工对未来的关注减轻了适应不良循环，而员工对过去的关注则阻碍了适应循环。因此，我们的研究为员工目标追求过程提供了重要的理论和实证见解。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。