Past, present or future?: the effects of temporal focus on employees' discretionary behaviors

global, and primary goals without becoming lost or experiencing anxiety. In contrast, people who are low in NFC view the endeavor to reconcile different information to predict and plan as tedious and stressful, as this cognitive activity forces them to do what they are not intrinsically motivated to do. People low in NFC rely more on simple cues, intuition, heuristics, and stereotypes in interpreting situations (Petty, Brinol, Loersch, & McCaslin, 2009). Therefore, individuals with low NFC, who are less motivated to predict the future based on an in-depth analysis of a broad range of information, prefer to act in two ways. Some people imagine 67 freely, follow their stream of consciousness, and allow themselves to daydream. Even though they have pictured their so-called “dreams and goals,” these goals are usually unrealistic (Van Boven, Kane, & McGraw, 2009), unstructured, and goal-irrelevant, and are defined as low-level thinking characteristics in construal level theory (e.g., Liberman, 2003). With less cognitive effort, people in daydreaming mode project themselves into a vividly imagined picture involving concrete details (e.g., “I will raise a white cat in a big house with European style decorations), which creates a proximate psychological distance and thus represents concrete thinking (low construal level). For some other low-NFC thinkers, they may simply extend their present life goals into the future (e.g., I hope that I don’t need to worry about loans in the future) or use their observation of other people’s present lives as their future goals, reflecting a smaller psychological distance between the present and future. This proximate psychological distance, according to CLT, determines that their mindset is mentally represented at low construal levels. Therefore, I hypothesize that future focus decreases employee levels of thinking for individuals with low NFC. Taken together, I propose the following: Hypothesis 3: Future focus is positively related to construal level for individuals with high need for cognition (H3a) and negatively related to construal level for individuals with low need for cognition (H3b). 3.1. 4 The Interactions among Past Focus, Present Focus and Future Focus The tripartite definition of temporal focus implies that people can have multiple temporal foci and devote their attention to past, present, and future to different degrees in a temporal focus profile (McGrath & Rotchford, 1983; Shipp et al., 2009; 68 Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999). However, research gives little attention to how people with different combinations of temporal foci think or act, or how those three types of temporal foci influence one another. For example, highly focusing on the present may constrain the individual’s horizon and capacity to achieve future goals. As I hypothesized previously on the processes by which people get stuck in the past, constrained in the present, and lost in the future, it is possible to provide many ways of helping individuals re-establish an integrated view of the past, present, and future periods in their lives. In the present study, I propose that for individuals with high need for cognition, low past focus, low present focus, and high future focus increase their level of thinking to the greatest extent. Specifically, exerting too much in-depth cognitive effort on past details and current contextual cues may cause them to be lost in the past and confused in the present, leading to a narrow mindset. Shifting attention away from the over-interpretations of trivial facts in the past and current details facilitates adaptive cognitive functioning (e.g., Holman & Silver, 1998, Silver et al., 1983) and strengthens the positive effect of future focus on construal level. To be specific, when thinking about the future, individuals with high need for cognition need to collect and reconcile useful experiences, knowledge, and current information to predict global trends, set primary goals, and make plans, while individuals with low past focus and low present focus eliminate the negative side of getting stuck in the past and present. For individuals with low need for cognition, low past focus, low present focus, and high future focus decrease their level of thinking to the greatest extent. Specifically, individuals low in NFC, who are not interested in in-depth cognitive analysis, tend to extract abstract information from the past and concentrate on the current task. If they 69 retain a low focus on the past and present, then they obtain no useful experiences from the past and have a low awareness of the present; in this case, they are more likely to engage in goal-irrelevant, unstructured, and unrealistic daydreaming about the future, exaggerating the negative side of future focus on the construal level. Therefore, I hypothesize the following: Hypothesis 4: There is a four-way interaction among past focus, present focus, future focus, and need for cognition on the construal level. For individuals with high need for cognition, low past focus, low present focus, and high future focus result in the highest construal level; for individuals with low need for cognition, low past focus, low present focus, and high future focus result in the lowest construal level. Table 4 provides a summary of the eight interactive conditions in which different levels of psychological distance are generated, leading to different construal levels. It also demonstrates that people with high need for cognition may pay more attention to the future, rather than to the past and present, whereas people with low need for cognition may devote more attention to the past and present but not to the