Following through on commitments builds trust. However, blind adherence to a prior course of action can undermine key organizational objectives. How can this challenge be resolved? Four primary experiments and five supplemental experiments (collective N = 7,759, all preregistered) reveal an effective communication strategy: precommitment (i.e., a public pledge to change course conditional on a concrete future state of the world). In the presence (vs. absence) of precommitment, observers deemed decision makers who de-escalated commitment as more trustworthy. This effect held across the roles of the decision makers (entrepreneurs vs. established leaders), the relationship with the decision makers (follower vs. third-party observer), contexts (consumer products vs. infrastructure projects), and measures (perceived integrity vs. incentivized behavior). These benefits for integrity were attenuated when the precommitment was to a vague future action or was not conditional on a concrete future state of the world. Finally, results revealed that precommitment can yield a negative externality: undermining perceived confidence and motivation among followers at a project's inception. Altogether, our work provides a nuanced perspective on a communication strategy decision makers can use to align short-term personal incentives (i.e., reputation management) and long-term organizational incentives (i.e., value maximization). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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预先承诺可以让决策者在降级承诺时保持信任。


信守承诺可以建立信任。然而，盲目遵守先前的行动方案可能会破坏关键的组织目标。如何解决这一挑战？四个主要实验和五个补充实验（集体 N = 7,759，全部预先注册）揭示了一种有效的沟通策略：预先承诺（即，以世界的具体未来状态为条件公开承诺改变方向）。在存在（相对于不存在）预先承诺的情况下，观察者认为降低承诺的决策者更值得信赖。这种影响体现在决策者的角色（企业家与成熟的领导者）、与决策者的关系（追随者与第三方观察者）、环境（消费品与基础设施项目）和措施（感知的诚信与激励行为）中。当预先承诺是针对模糊的未来行动或不以具体的未来世界状态为条件时，这些对诚信的好处就会减弱。最后，结果显示，预先承诺会产生负面的外部性：在项目开始时削弱追随者的信心和积极性。总而言之，我们的工作为决策者可以用来协调短期个人激励（即声誉管理）和长期组织激励（即价值最大化）的沟通策略提供了一个微妙的视角。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。