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This research aims to investigate how consumers’ authentic pride versus hubristic pride affects different construal levels of mind-sets and subsequent product evaluation by activating local versus global cognitive appraisal tendencies. Furthermore, this research also examines how lay theories impact the effects of pride on construal levels and how power moderates the effect of hubristic versus authentic pride on product preferences varying in construal levels.

Drawing on cognitive appraisal and construal level theories, this research conducts eight experimental studies to test the hypotheses with an ANOVA, bootstrap analysis and binary logistic regression analysis. The details of the experiments are presented in the paper.

The results show that people feeling authentic (hubristic) pride dominantly adopt a lower (higher) level of construal, and consequently put more weight on feasibility over desirability (desirability over feasibility) attributes. Authentic pride’s inclination to appeal behavior-specific appraisals triggers local appraisal tendencies and bestows lower construal levels, whereas hubristic pride’s inclination to connect the entire self triggers global appraisal tendencies and confers higher construal levels. Incremental (vs entity) theorists are likely to attribute the pride experience to their efforts (traits), and thus feel authentic (hubristic) pride. Furthermore, the product preferences of people experiencing authentic vs hubristic pride depend on their power state.

Notwithstanding the importance of this research, it is worthwhile to note some of its limitations to encourage future research. First, eight studies in the lab were conducted, but no real behavior study was conducted. Although there is a high correlation between the results of lab studies and those of real behavior studies, the authors encourage future researches to elicit the consumers’ pride in the actual consumption situation using a real behavior study. Furthermore, this research mainly focuses on pride, and does not examine other positive emotions, e.g. happiness. Therefore, the authors encourage future research to examine other positive emotions.

The findings suggest that it is appropriate to use construal levels to match consumers’ pride types. In fact, marketers can induce hubristic pride or authentic pride in ads by simply using words or sentences (“feeling proud because of your hard work” or “feeling proud, you are so superior and remarkably unique”), and present either higher- or lower-level construal of desired behaviors to improve advertising effects.

The research contributes to literature by documenting how hubristic/authentic pride can affect distinct construal levels via activating global/local appraisal tendencies. And this research thoroughly illustrates the mechanism by which hubristic/authentic pride activates global versus local appraisal tendencies. More importantly, this research finds how lay theories affect construal level given a pride experience and it also corroborates the moderating effects of power in the proposed relationship, which establish the boundary conditions of the effects of prides on construal levels.

Previous studies have vague views about whether employees who are required to complete large amounts of work (i.e. role overload) would proactively create a change in their job characteristics (i.e. job crafting), because the cognitive mechanism underlying the nexus between role overload and job crafting is unclear. The aim of this study is to identify why and when role overload has an impact on job crafting.

This study builds a second-stage moderated mediation model. Using a two-wave panel field study of 213 employee–supervisor matched data, this study examines the proposed hypotheses.

Results show that role overload decreases construal level, which can determine the tendency of employees to focus on the feasibility (low level of construal) or desirability (high level of construal) of behaviors. Goal self-concordance is the degree to which employees pursue their personal goals based on feelings of personal interests and values. The authors find that goal self-concordance guides employees who have higher levels of construal to exert more effort in job crafting. The authors further find that goal self-concordance moderates the mediating role of construal level. Specifically, for employees in pursuit of self-concordant goals, role overload reduces their construal level, resulting in less effort in job crafting. For employees who do not pursue self-concordant goals, role overload decreases their construal level, thereby improving job crafting.

The findings of this study enrich the literature on role overload and job crafting by revealing the mechanism and boundary conditions of the relationship between role overload and job crafting.

Based on the construal level theory, the purpose of this study is to prove the effect of interaction between construal level and visual crowding on consumers' buying intention. The study tries to explain the reasons behind the different buying intention toward visual crowding among consumers with different construal level.

This study was conducted through two situational simulation experiments. The main data analysis methods are ANOVA and bootstrap analysis.

(1) the matching of construal level and visual crowding has a significant effect on consumers’ buying intention. (2) Perceptual fluency mediates the interaction between the construal level and visual crowding on buying intention.

This study measures consumers' buying intention through situational experiments but does not measure consumers' buying behavior through real scenarios.

According to the study conclusions, consumers prefer visually crowded packaging that matches their construal level. Enterprises should consider the impact of the construal level on the effect of packaging stimulation.

This study enriches the theory related to construal level and highlights the mediating role of perceptual fluency. The addition of perceptual fluency explains the mechanism by which visual crowding affects consumers' buying intention. This extends the research on the antecedents and effects of perceptual fluency.

This study innovatively introduces visual crowding into packaging and matches visual crowding to construal level, explaining why different consumers buy different visually crowded packaging.

Consumers usually respond favourably to ingroups but negatively to dissociative groups and products linked to dissociative groups, termed the dissociative group effect. Despite important implications for branding, advertising and celebrity endorsement, little is known about how to attenuate the effect. This paper aims to introduce a mechanism which attenuates the dissociative group effect by drawing on construal level theory.

An experimental approach was used which included two-part between-subjects designs.

High identifiers prefer products linked to their ingroup over ones linked to a dissociative group, however, the opposite is true for low identifiers. The difference in preference is attenuated for high and low identifiers when they are placed in an abstract mind-set. The underlying mechanism of this effect is similarity focus.

The same context was used to ensure that the attenuating effect found was not due to contextual factors. However, further studies should replicate the findings in a wider variety of contexts.

This research offers practical recommendations on how to manage multiple customer segments in increasingly diverse marketplaces. By inducing an abstract mind-set in customers, for example, via advertising copy, website architecture or contextual factors such as pitch of the music, marketers can increase the effectiveness of identity-linking marketing for consumers’ high/low in identification.

This is one of the first empirical studies to evidence the applicability of construal level theory within identity marketing and offers a novel mechanism to attenuate the dissociative group effect. The findings shed new light on how low identifiers relate and respond to identity-linked marketing.

This research draws upon construal level theory to investigate how brands can develop effective international marketing strategies using country image versus product image across international markets with different cultural distances between them.

The paper reports two preliminary studies and three experimental studies in the context of Australian brands using a “clean and green” image. The preliminary studies explore how product versus country image and cultural similarity are related to construal levels. Then, Study 1 examines consumers from different countries as a proxy of cultural distance, whereas Studies 2 and 3 manipulate levels of cultural distance to test the effects on consumers. Moreover, Study 3 also uses a behavioral outcome as the focal dependent variable and tests the underlying mechanism.

The results demonstrate a significant interaction effect between country-of-origin positioning and cultural distance, such that an Australian brand emphasizing the country (vs product) image gains more favorable responses among consumers with high levels of cultural distance. Conversely, an Australian brand emphasizing the product (vs country) image gains more favorable responses among consumers with low levels of cultural distance. Further, this research identifies perceived brand cultural authenticity as the underlying process driving the interaction effect.

The findings of this research contribute to the literature on international marketing in general and the country-of-origin literature in particular by examining country-of-origin positioning and cultural distance from the construal level perspective. The research also provides managerial implications on how to promote products in the international market across different cultural distances.

Service encounters are becoming increasingly virtual through the infusion of computer-mediated technologies. Virtual services separate consumers and service providers both spatially and temporally. With the advent of virtual services is the need to theoretically explain how service separability is psychologically perceived by consumers across the spectrum of computer-mediated technologies. Drawing on construal-level theory, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a theoretical framework depicting consumer’s construal of spatial and temporal separation across a continuum of technology-mediated service virtuality.

The authors conducted two studies: first, to investigate consumers’ levels of mental construal associated with varying degrees of service separation across a spectrum of technology-mediated services; second, to empirically examine consumer evaluations of service quality in response to varying degrees of spatial and temporal service separation. These relationships were tested across two service industries: education and tourism.

Consumers mentally construe psychological distance in response to service separation and these observations vary across the spectrum of service offerings ranging from face-to-face (no psychological distance) through to virtual (spatially and temporally separated – high psychological distance) services. Further, spatial separation negatively affects consumers’ service evaluations; such that as service separation increases, consumers’ service evaluations decrease. No such significant findings support the similar effect of temporal separation on customer service evaluations. Moreover, specific service industry-based distances exist such that consumers responded differentially for a credence (education) vs an experiential (tourism) service.

Recent studies in services marketing have challenged the inseparability assumption inherent for services. This paper builds on this knowledge and is the first to integrate literature on construal-level theory, service separability, and virtual services into a holistic conceptual framework which explains variance in consumer evaluations of separated service encounters. This is important due to the increasingly virtual nature of service provider-customer interactions across a diverse range of service industries (i.e. banking and finance, tourism, education, and health care). Service providers must be cognisant of the psychological barriers which are imposed by increased technology infusion in virtual services.

This study aims to investigate how charitable advertising effectiveness in response to threat-based awe, an emotional response that typically arises in the presence of natural disasters, is likely to depend on the construal level.

Three experimental studies were conducted to examine the positive and negative effects of threat-based awe on charitable advertising effectiveness. Further, the moderating role of construal level was tested and the underlying mechanisms established.

Consumers who experience a high (vs low) level of threat-based awe donate more when evaluating a disaster-relief advertisement processed at a high construal level (e.g. when an advertisement is framed as a “why” message) but donate less when evaluating a disaster-relief advertisement processed at a low construal level (e.g. when an advertisement is framed as a “how” message). Further, the authors established two distinct mechanisms underlying these divergent effects. At a high construal level, consumers are driven by concern for others, whereas at a low construal level, consumers are driven by feelings of powerlessness.

The present research contributes to the literature on how emotions influence charitable advertising effectiveness by establishing the divergent effects of threat-based awe and the moderating role of construal level.

This paper offers managerial implications for nonprofits and charities in developing effective charitable advertising strategies in the context of natural disaster-relief campaigns.

The present research provides a novel perspective on when and why threat-based awe, a unique emotion arising in the case of natural disasters, can lead to positive or negative effects on charitable advertising effectiveness.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether leader-follower similarity in construal level of the work, which indicates the degree of abstraction applied to mental representation of the work, influences the quality of interpersonal relationship at work.

First, an interview study was conducted to adapt the work-based construal-level (WBCL) scale. Then, a survey study was conducted for hypothesis testing. Data collected from 245 matched supervisor-subordinate dyads were analyzed using multi-level modeling.

Results revealed that dyadic similarity in work-domain construal level is positively related to leader-member exchange (LMX) quality. As a leader and a follower become similar to each other in terms of mental representation (i.e. construal level) of work, they experience higher relationship quality.

This study enhances the current knowledge of the role of cognition and cognitive similarity in leadership processes.

While there has been a great deal of research to distinguish the factors that promote the adoption of sustainable consumption, however there has been a very little attention given to the contribution of justice, coping appraisal, and psychological distance. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential role of deontic justice, protection motivation, and construal level theories to elucidate the green purchase intention.

Data were collected from 471 participants in a laboratory experiment. Then, structural equation modeling was carried out to analyze the data.

Protection motivation theory is valuable to apply specifically since it introduces the concept of coping appraisal. The findings demonstrate that deontic justice theory (DJT) is a suitable framework that can be employed to shed more light on sustainable consumption. The study shows that consumer can conceptualize a green product at different levels of concreteness or abstraction.

This study is a pioneering effort to look at sustainable consumption within the context of DJT. It departs from the more traditional research by repositioning moral obligation as the primary driver of green purchase intention and by elucidating when green purchase intention is elevated in investigating the moderating role of mindset.

Extending the technology acceptance model (TAM) to a new context, the purpose of this paper is to propose an integrative model of the brand of artificial intelligence-enabled voice assistants (AI-EVA) and customers’ perceptions and behavioral intentions of using AI-EVA in hotels. Moderating effects of construal levels and hotel scales were examined.

This paper adopted a mixed method approach. A qualitative and phenomenological methodology was adopted in Study 1 to explore hotel customers’ experience with AI-EVA. Study 2 applied experimental design to investigate the effects of the brand of AI-EVA and construal level on customers’ perceptions and behavioral intentions of using AI-EVA. Based on Studies 1 and 2 results, Study 3 examined how the brand of AI-EVA and hotel scale affect customers’ perceptions and behavioral intentions of using AI-EVA during hotel stays.

This research found that customers perceive a higher level of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and anthropomorphism when AI-EVA is branded (vs off-brand). Perceived usefulness positively affects customers’ intention to use and to spread positive word-of-mouth. Anxiety of using AI-enabled devices and privacy concerns inhibit customers’ intention to use AI-EVA. Anthropomorphism increases customers’ willingness to spread positive word-of-mouth. Construal level moderates the effect of the brand of AI-EVAs on perceived ease of use and anthropomorphism. Hotel scale moderates the effect of brand on perceived usefulness.

This paper is one of the first attempts to uncover and integrate different factors underlying customers’ perceptions of using AI-EVA in an extended TAM in hotel settings. This paper provides an integrative model extending the TAM to a new context by deploying a mixed-method approach across three studies.