Extant research has consistently demonstrated that negative perfectionism is an important driver of procrastination. However, existing studies suffer from several salient limitations, such as an inadequacy in understanding its mediating mechanism, and the lack of an overarching theoretical framework. Accordingly, the present study adopts the ego depletion theory to investigate how and under what conditions negative perfectionism leads to procrastination. Specifically, we propose that fear of failure and ego depletion serially mediate the effect of negative perfectionism on procrastination, and that cognitive flexibility moderates this chain mediating effect.
In this study, questionnaires were distributed to college students in Beijing through a questionnaire survey platform. In order to avoid the common methodological biases, data were collected using a three-wave survey strategy with a lag of one month between each survey. In the first survey, participants' negative perfectionism (the independent variable) and cognitive flexibility (the moderator), along with their demographics, were measured. Information about participants' backgrounds was also recorded. In the second survey, two mediators (i.e., fear of failure and ego depletion) were measured. the last survey, which aimed to measure the dependent variable (i.e., procrastination). The final effective sample size was 490. The results of hierarchical regression and PRCESS analysis show that: (a) negative perfectionism influences procrastination through the chain mediating effect of fear of failure and ego depletion; (b) cognitive flexibility moderates the effect of fear of failure on ego depletion in that the effect is weaker when cognitive flexibility is high rather than low; and (c) cognitive flexibility moderates the chain mediating effect of negative perfectionism on procrastination, such that this chain mediation is weaker when cognitive flexibility is high rather than low. Our findings are discussed in terms of the theoretical contribution to reveal the mechanism by which negative perfectionism results in negative effects from the novel perspective of ego depletion.
Through theoretical derivation and empirical test of the hypothesis, this study provides a new theoretical perspective for negative perfectionism leading to procrastination behavior. The results show that ego depletion theory is a good theoretical framework to explain the relationship between negative perfectionism and procrastination. And the analysis of chain mediating and moderating effects based on this theoretical framework has made theoretical contributions: On the one hand, this study found that negative perfectionism leads to procrastination through (and only through) the chain mediating effect of fear of failure and ego depletion. On the other hand, cognitive flexibility is an important boundary condition for negative perfectionism to lead to procrastination through fear of failure and ego depletion. When the cognitive flexibility is high, the degree of procrastination caused by negative perfectionism is low, that is, cognitive flexibility alleviates the loss degree of self-resources caused by fear of failure. This conclusion provides important implications for reducing the procrastination tendency of negative perfectionism. In general, This study, from the perspective of the generation and regulation mechanism of negative perfectionism, has important theoretical and practical significance for clinical intervention to reduce the negative impact of negative perfectionism and how to prevent procrastination behavior.
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