Construal Level is Stable Within-Person Over Time : A Repeated-Measures Study of Construal Level and Outcomes

Construal level — essentially, whether you are focusing on the forest or the trees — hasproven itself a consequential and highly-predictive variable in the workplace. This paper aimed to extend the construal level literature in two major areas. First, it attempted to develop and validate a new measure of construal level capable of capturing the four dimensions of psychological distance that underpin construal level. Second, this study aimed to understand individual differences in construal level more deeply by capturing a distribution of daily construal levels within-person, and testing whether patterns of stability and fluctuation in these distributions are associated with meaningful differences in work-related outcomes between-person. A new measure of psychological distance was constructed with four independent factors, and it was shown to predict several work-related outcomes relevant to construal level. However, the new measure did not correlate with existing measures of construal level. Next, in a repeated measures study, construal level measured with the Behavior Identification Form exhibited excellent within-person stability across five days. Average construal level was shown to positively predict visioning behaviors, and negatively predict avoidance motivation. Ultimately, this dissertation bolsters the case that there are stable individual differences in construal level between-person, and provides some initial evidence that these differences have work-related consequences.