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Managerial mindset and cognitive bias can be barriers to any transformation strategy. In the case of telework, most employees express willingness to telework, yet, few firms formally enable it during regular business hours. The status quo is a daily commute to the traditional workplace. The purpose of this paper is to test framing interventions designed to harness cognitive biases through choice architecture.

Drawing upon behavioral strategy and prospect theory, this paper presents two studies: quasi-experiments with 146 senior business students and experiments in the field (replication using random assignment and extension) with 84 senior decision makers. Both studies use a one-way between-subjects design and chi-square analysis.

Findings support the proposition that, although cognitive biases can act as barriers to transformation, they can be re-framed through strategic interventions. Specifically, in both studies, there was a drastic increase in adoption simply by changing the way the choice was presented. Findings in the lab were cross-validated in the field. Observed shifts in preferences provide evidence that embedding the right reference point within communications can frame a decision choice more favorably. Findings also support that a bias for an implicitly perceived status quo can be overruled through an explicitly stated reference point.

It is an assumption of behavioral strategy that most individuals simply respond to the gains/loss framing without being influenced by other psychological or contextual factors, and though these effects dissipate through aggregation, it is a limitation nonetheless. Indeed, using an individual construct to explain an organizational phenomenon is a well-debated topic in the field of strategy, with proponents on both sides. The distinguishing factor, here, is that behavioral strategists are only interested in results at the aggregated level.

Practitioners attempting to roll out telework adoption, or any transformation, now have proven strategies for designing frames of reference that intervene against and harness the power of loss aversion and the status quo.

This paper measures micro processes that have an effect at the macro level. It explains systematic aversion to adoption as an aggregation of decision-making behavior that is seemingly subconscious. In doing so, it highlights the impact of bounded rationality perpetuated through social systems, while measuring effective interventions designed to make systematic behavior more predictable.

A novel contribution is made in designing/testing a new frame for systematic resistance to change that frames the status quo as the losing prospect. In this frame, the perceived loss is in the choice not to change, and loss aversion proves to be an effective tool for facilitating systematic change.

When consumers imagine themselves in various consumption scenarios, they can do so from the actor or the observer perspective. These different vantage points are known as imagery perspectives. This paper aims to investigate how imagery perspectives can influence consumers’ decisions to stay with the status quo (default option) or to switch to an alternative.

A series of four experimental design studies were conducted in both lab and online settings to study consumers’ switching tendency and choice. The empirical testing involved products, brands and services, including cameras (Study 1), vacation hotels (Study 2), toilet paper (Study 3) and food (Study 4).

The authors demonstrate that compared with actor imagery that tends to perpetuate the default product and brand choice, observer imagery increases consumers’ tendency to change and switch to new products and brands.

Due to the methods used in empirical testing, the research results may lack generalizability.

Marketers spend a considerable amount of resources in an attempt to get consumers to switch products and brands. The results of this paper shed light on how marketers can promote switching behaviors through imagery perspective.

The research contributes to the streams of research in mental imagery, de-biasing and status quos, which have progressed in isolation from one another to date. This research is one of the first to investigate imagery perspective in the context of choice architecture.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the influence of status quo on information system (IS) adoption. Organizations often substantially allocate resources to leverage existing IT investments. The incumbent system deployment and the institutional environment will exert the influence on the new IS adoption of firms. The findings provide insights for explaining why firms conservatively react toward an emerging IT innovation.

The research design of the present study is consisted of the following steps. First, the related theoretical foundations of system adoption are reviewed for constructing the research framework. Second, based on the status quo bias theory, this study proposes a conceptual model. Third, the research data set was constructed through collecting manuscripts by conducting journal-by-journal searching in electronic databases. Finally, the protocol proposed by Lipsey and Wilson (2001) was used to conduct the meta-analysis.

Through a meta-analysis with 34 published studies, this study provides three observations. First, the results provide supports for the magnitude and significance of proposed relationships. Second, the relationships between status quo factors, expectations, and IS adoption are indeed related. Third, the considerable variability across effect sizes can be attributed to the type of adoption, the type of focal system, and the type of institutional pressures.

Although the meta-analytic results provide supports for the significance and magnitude of proposed relationships, the follow-up manuscripts searching and further analyses are needed.

This research presents a collective understanding of systems adoption from status quo bias perspective. The findings provide insights for further researches on IS adoption.

Organizations may fail to innovate because receivers exhibit bias against adopting creative ideas. This paper explores many motivational, cognitive, and affective factors that can cause receivers to hinder the creativity–innovation process. In particular, receivers may engage in motivated reasoning and skepticism against creative ideas, face barriers to recognizing creative value, and experience negative affect when receiving creative ideas. Each creative adoption decision point during the creativity–innovation process is an opportunity for bias to derail progress. This helps explain why innovation can be so difficult. Understanding the biases that hinder the creativity–innovation process allows individuals and organizations to take action to mitigate them.

This article investigates the influence of status quo bias (SQB) on venture capital investments.

The authors use the dynamic panel probit (respectively logit) model for 24 countries over nine years (from 2007–2015).

The authors’ regressions reveal that the SQB is meaningful in real decisions. Indeed, the authors find that the choice of investment sectors depends positively on the previous choice. Moreover, the study identifies other factors that were perceived to influence the choice of the investment industry such as added value by activity and the venture capital (VC) country attractiveness index.

By knowing the behavior of VC FIRMS, entrepreneurs would better frame their business plans and better target the VC to whom they should better contact.

No research has dealt with this question, yet status quo is consensually recognized as an omnipresent institutional factor.

This study explains and predicts smartwatch adoption trends among non-users of smartwatches based on theories of the diffusion of innovation and inertia. It explores the impact of satisfaction with the status-quo with traditional wristwatches, on attitudes toward smartwatches and intentions to adopt the technology.

The study used PLS-SEM to conduct a multi-group analysis considering high (HSQS) and low (LSQS) status-quo satisfaction groups. The multi-group analysis followed the MICOM procedure, and the software SmartPLS three was used to analyse the data.

The results suggest that attitudes of the LSQS group were more strongly impacted by perceived ease of use and trialability. Their attitude toward innovation also had a stronger effect on their adoption intention. For the HSQS group, social influence more strongly impacted adoption intention; this group also perceived the disruption associated with an innovation as greater than the LSQS group. Analysis using PLS-Predict indicated that both models have considerable predictive power.

Most scholarship on this subject has taken a positive view of the diffusion and adoption of smartwatches. This study considers smartwatches from positive and inhibitory perspectives. In the context of smartwatches, this is the first scholarly attempt at comparing levels of resistance to innovation adoption to consumer satisfaction with the status quo.

This research sought to understand better how readily managers choose action to change the status quo. Specifically, in experimentally manipulated ambiguous situations, I examined the effect of managers’ promotion and prevention focus on how much information they wish to review to help them choose.

I developed a novel experimental paradigm and applied it in a sample of 157 managers. Managers faced choosing action (change the status quo) versus non-action (keep the status quo), and I test under which circumstances they want to review more information that they believe will help them choose effectively.

The experiment showed evidence that (1) managers with a prevention focus want to review more information when they are trying to assure that they do not choose action erroneously; (2) managers with a promotion focus want to review more information when they are trying to assure that they do not choose non-action erroneously.

This research provides an original perspective on a managerial decision-making phenomenon. It goes beyond managers’ choice preferences to examine a practically relevant outcome of the process of deliberating about taking action to change the status quo.

The purpose of this study is to examine the behaviour of retail investors while making an investment decision and how it gets affected by the behavioural biases of the investors using a moderated-mediation framework.

A mixed method approach has been used to fulfil the objectives of the study. In the first study, a qualitative analysis of the interviews with 15 retail investors was conducted. As part of the quantitative study, a total of 201 responses from Indian retail investors were collected using systematic sampling and analysed using structural equation modelling and Process Macro.

The results indicate that anchoring bias, availability bias, herding bias, switching cost, sunk cost, regret avoidance and perceived threat have a significant effect on retail investors’ investing intention. The attitude of the investors towards investing decisions mediates the effects of behavioural bias and the status quo on investment intention. The results of the moderated-mediation analysis indicate that mediating effect of attitude varied at the low and high-risk aversion of investors.

The findings of this study will help regulators and retail investors to understand the critical behavioural biases which affect the investors’ investing intention.

The paper contributes to the literature on investors’ behaviour, status quo bias theory (SQB) and behavioural bias. This study uniquely proposes a moderated-mediation framework to understand the effects of biases on retail investors’ investment intention.

This paper aims to focus on why some practitioners in learning disability services resist implementing evidence-based approaches, such as positive behaviour support, despite its benefits.

Status quo bias theory was used to explain why practitioners choose existing practices over evidence-based approaches despite the negative consequences to their well-being.

Staff members’ decision to maintain the status quo should not be based solely on a cost–benefit analysis, as is commonly believed, as several factors influence it.

This lies on the development of leadership action based on the factors that influence staff's decision making in favour of the status quo.

Organizational sustainability has become a priority on many corporate agendas. How to integrate sustainability efforts throughout the organization, however, remains a challenge. The purpose of this paper is to examine two factors that potentially enhance incentive effects on employee engagement in environmental objectives: explicit organizational values for sustainability and the performance objective’s complementarity with incented financial objectives.

The authors employed a quasi-experimental design in which participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, including a status quo condition against which the treatments were contrasted. Participants (n=400) were comprised of a cross-section of US employees from a wide range of occupations and industries. A post hoc qualitative analysis provided additional insights.

Incentive effects were enhanced (i.e. preference for the environmental objective was significantly higher) when the environmental project offered complementary benefits for financial objectives, but not when organization values emphasized sustainability. An entrenched status quo bias for financial performance was discerned among a subset of the sample.

Management scholars must pay close attention to the role of implicit norms for financial performance when investigating employee engagement in organizational sustainability efforts. From an applied perspective, framing sustainability objectives to emphasize financial benefits consistent with a financial mission may maximize employee engagement.

This study contributes to understanding of organizational sustainability efforts at the individual employee level of analysis, a conspicuously small part of the organizational research surrounding this topic.