The Impact of Self-Determination on the Information-Stopping Behavior of Professionals: An Exploratory Study in the Software Industry

Online search has become an important part of professional and daily life. With an endless amount of information available, terminating the search when sufficient information is gathered is critical for managing decision-making. So far, research has analyzed cognitive influences: how people process information and how their mental models influence stopping. However, little is known about motivational influences arising from individual desires, preferences, or incentives. In this research-in-progress paper, we consider the role of motivation on stopping behavior. Drawing on self-determination theory, we develop a structure of motivation, propose its influence on stopping behavior, and conduct exploratory case studies on an individual level in the software industry. Our results show that a more self-determined motivation results in a more intensive and longer information search – that is, in later stopping. This finding is the first step toward the development of motivational stopping rules