Any number of business books and employment experts cite positive thinking as the juice that fuels career success. But research shows that strategically applied pessimism can bring about positive outcomes, too. It just depends on who's doing the applying.
"In American culture, we think optimism is good without qualifiers or asterisks," says Julie Norem, author of "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak" (Basic Books, 2002).
But optimism isn't for everyone. Every organization is made up of "promotion-focused" goal setters and "prevention-focused" goal setters, according to Easton, Pa.-based social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, author of "Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals" (Hudson Street Press, 2011). Each type of person can reach the same company goal, but the former thinks mostly about maximizing gains while the latter thinks mostly of minimizing losses.
Optimism works for promotion-minded people but fails for the prevention-minded.
"Optimism makes prevention-focused people lose their sense of vigilance," Halvorson says, and with it their drive to succeed.
Just as there are "good" dietary fats and bad ones, there is a kind of pessimism associated with failure and an altogether different kind that helps ensure success.
Good, or "defensive," pessimism is protective and leads to constructive action. It's a strategy applied to specific situations as opposed to dispositional pessimism, which is a state of mind. An employee who's defensively pessimistic looks at a task or project and imagines all the ways it could go awry. Then, he or she devises ways to avoid or work around each potential pitfall.
"Defensive pessimism might look a little crazy and obsessive from the outside," acknowledges Norem, an associate professor of psychology at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. "You think of all the things that can go wrong in great detail."
For example, before a presentation, a person might anticipate pulling down the screen for a PowerPoint show only to have the screws fail and the screen crumple to the ground. Having imagined this and other catastrophes, the person would then take measures to avert it by showing up early and tightening screws if necessary.
"Some of us are more energized by thinking about how everything could go wrong - and trying to keep that from happening - while others are more energized by imagining how great it will feel to succeed," Halvorson says.
"Defensive pessimism and realistic optimism are both motivating," she adds, "but they differ in terms of whether you are focused on achieving success or avoiding failure."