Pacing styles, personality and performance

Whereas many struggle to meet deadlines, 'the time by which some task is supposed to be completed' (Locke & Latham 1990: 7), some seem to have developed ways to pace effectively before reaching a deadline. Although there has been considerable attention among researchers regarding time-related individual chamcteristics (for an overview, see Francis-Smythe & Robertson 1999), only a few studies have addressed how individuals pace themselves before a deadline. Waller Conte, Gibson and Carpenter (2001) suggested that a combination of time urgency and time perspective may be used to classify persons into four categories to distinguish the way in which they handle deadlines. To our knowledge, empirical analysis of these categories has yet to be conducted. In our research, we have adopted a different approach by developing a graphic scale to assess people's pacing styles (Gevers, Rutte & Van Eerde 2006). This scale inquires into the preferred distribution of effort over the time interval towards a deadline. Building on earlier work from Lim and Mumighan (1994) and Blount and Janicik (2002), we developed several graphs showing pacing styles with steady, increasing, or decreasing activity over time, or combinations of these styles. In this chapter, we aim to explore the value of the pacing style and the use of gmphic scales to predict individual and team-based performance. [n particular, we examine how the pacing styles we identified are distributed in three samples, and whether they explain variance in performance outcomes over and above the personality mit 'conscientiousness'. We describe three projects, involving students and professionals operating individually and in teams in a training context and a real organizational environment, in which we test two gmphic scales for measuring pacing styles