Knowledge is increasingly recognized as one of the most critical resources in the modern workplace, because the way knowledge is learned, shared and used determines organizational innovation and effectiveness. In my dissertation, I build on construal level theory to explore the relationship between workers' roles and the types of knowledge that workers create and share. In particular, I draw upon two features of the modern workplace that are evolving dramatically - the increasing use of technology and changing hierarchical structures - to explore how the level of abstraction at which employees mentally represent their work roles mediates the relationship between these structural features of the work context and the practically-relevant and important employee behaviors underlying innovation. I leverage methodological diversity to test the hypotheses in eight studies, including two studies based on archival data, four laboratory experiments and two longitudinal studies based on survey data.

Companies are under increasing pressure from every category of stakeholder, from government and community to supply chain and consumer, to improve the environmental sustainability of their operations, products and services. To be most successful with environmental sustainability improvement initiatives, a company must have the commitment and effort of its employees. The purpose of this research is to study the effect of the company’s approach to the initiative on the level of employee commitment to the company’s environmental sustainability goals. This research was conducted with a two-factor, factorial experiment. The experimental factors were construal level and small wins framing. Each of these factors had two levels, creating a 2x2 design with four treatment level combinations. A third study factor was environmental concern. Four other variables, goal difficulty, perceived organizational efficacy, gender and age, were included in the model as control variables. The dependent variable was goal commitment. Approximately 150 participants were recruited for the experiment and randomly assigned to one of the four fixed, treatment combinations. Hierarchical regression was used to estimate the factors’ main and interaction effects, as well as the significance of the control variables. Neither of the two manipulated variables, construal level and small wins, was found to have a significant main effect on goal commitment. There were, however, significant interactions between environmental concern and construal level, and between environmental concern and small wins framing, on goal commitment. At high levels of environmental concern, the effects of construal level and small wins were as hypothesized, but at low levels of environmental concern, the effects of construal level and small wins were opposite of what was expected. Additionally, both organizational efficacy and gender were found to significantly affect one’s goal commitment.

Consideration set formation has been suggested as an important decision-making stage prior to choice. The current research focuses on consideration sets in the memory-based choice context and addresses the gaps in the existing literature by investigating the effects of mindset abstraction on memory retrieval and the number of considered choice alternatives retrieved from memory. I propose that individuals in a concrete (vs. abstract) mindset think more contextual and specific details (vs. fewer essences) about a certain decision situation; therefore concrete and fine-grained mental representations, compared to abstract and rough representations, will activate more associated cues in memory and lead to larger memory-based consideration sets. Through a word association task, studies 1a and 1b show that concrete mindsets leads to more proliferative associations and a greater number of conceptual cues than abstract mindsets. In the domain of product consideration (i.e., snack and dinner), studies 2a and 2b directly demonstrate that individuals in concrete mindsets form a larger memory-based consideration set than ones in abstract mindsets. I further propose the Hypothesis of Top-down versus Bottom-up Approach of Memory Retrieval to explain the mechanism that underlies the mindset abstraction effect on size of memory-based consideration sets. Studies 3 and 4, using an episodic memory paradigm, support this hypothesis and reveal that the type of retrieval cues (superordinate vs. subordinate cues) used by individuals in an abstract versus a concrete mindset determines the likelihood that a brand is considered, and that the richer associations located at the subordinate level contribute to a greater number of choice alternatives that people consider in a concrete mindset. The theoretical contributions, practical implications, and future research directions of this research are finally discussed.

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This dissertation comprises three studies, a literature review and two experimental studies, that center on the effects of psychological distance on judgment and decision-making in accounting. Construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance (Liberman and Trope 1998; Trope and Liberman 2003), a framework recently developed in the field of social psychology, constitutes the theoretical foundation for each study. The first study reviews extant literature on CLT and illustrates the theory's potential for investigating previously unexplained phenomena within the accounting domain. Selected publications that apply CLT in contexts that are of particular interest to accounting researchers are emphasized and a series of broad, CLT-based research questions pertaining to various accounting domains are offered. The second study applies CLT to the audit context by investigating whether the performance of common auditing tasks that require varying degrees of abstract thinking affect decision-makers' overall mindset and hence their subsequent judgment. Results from the second study have important implications for audit practice as auditors work in environments that require frequent shifts in focus due to multiple client or project demands. The third study applies CLT to the enterprise risk management context by examining how spatial distance from a risk assessment object and risk category (i.e., the type of risk) affects decision-makers' assessment of the probability that the risk will materialize. The third study thus informs the corporate governance literature by identifying psychological distance as a potential source for judgment bias during the risk assessment process. Overall, the results reported in this dissertation suggest that psychological distance systematically affects individuals' judgment subject to the caveat that the judgment of concern falls within the domain of the decision-maker's routine cognition. By presenting empirical evidence from both the audit and the risk management domain, the studies contribute to our understanding of the heuristics and biases in judgment and decision-making in professional settings that are of interest to accounting research.

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Marketing appeals often capitalize upon nostalgia. By highlighting periods of the past, practitioners hope to elicit positive associations in the minds of consumers between the past and desired responses, from purchases to donations to political support. Though less often, marketing appeals also draw upon the future as a way of making the featured good or service more appealing to potential consumers. Could these different temporal distances into the future or into the past impact the reaction of consumers? Could the context of a product being either hedonic or utilitarian have an influence on the outcome of these past or future based appeals? Further, in the case of balanced products with relatively equal hedonic and utilitarian natures, could the pairing of appeals related to different lengths of time into the past or future with hedonic or utilitarian appeal influence consumers as well? Exploring these possibilities through qualitative in-depth interviews with practitioners and consumers offers the potential to find answers and add to the body of knowledge. The fundamental premise of Construal Level Theory (Trope and Liberman, 2000) comes into play in this pursuit. Construal Level Theory states that psychological distance, be it temporal, spatial, social, or hypothetical (Trope, Liberman, and Wakslak, 2007) has an impact upon the decision-making outcomes of individuals due to their perception of the issues involved as being either abstract or concrete. It is in this context that this dissertation investigates the use of past-based and future-based appeals of varying temporal distances in relation to products of either a hedonic or utilitarian nature, as well as appeals based on either utilitarian or hedonic motivations. As a result of this analysis temporal distance was revealed to play a role in consumer responses, but a different one than initially expected. Rather than the temporal direction of either past or future favoring hedonic or utilitarian products and messaging, the relative proximity to the present proved to be the more powerful influence. The nearuture and near-past advertising treatments offered advantages to hedonic products, and faruture and far-past advertising treatments offered advantages to utilitarian products.

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