Individual preferences in multiple goal pursuit: Reconsidering the conceptualization and dimensionality of polychronicity

With increasing demands in work and life, successful self-regulation of multiple goals becomes critical to the well-being and performance of individuals and organizations. When pursuing multiple goals, individuals may use different strategies and have divergent preferences toward these strategies. Polychronicity, or the preference for multitasking over sequential tasking, has long been considered a unidimensional construct with two opposing ends. To empirically test this assumption, we reconstructed existing polychronicity items to explore a new scale that measures preferences separately and synthesizes different operationalizations of multitasking (i.e., concurrent tasking and task switching) (study 1). We found that multitasking and sequential preferences, while related, have distinct components and can co-occur within individuals, challenging the traditional bipolar assumption (study 2). Finally, we used a behavioral task-switching paradigm to simulate a multitasking environment. We found that consistent with past research, the preferences were not associated with behavioral performance but were associated with subjective experience (study 3). Our findings suggest that assuming multitasking and sequential preferences are completely antithetical can be an oversimplification. This research opens opportunities for future research on multiple goals.