The Effects of Communication of Causal Linkages and Incentives on Employees’ Construal Level Mindsets

This study investigates how two management controls, communication of the causal linkages between employees’ current actions and future outcomes and incentives that tie employees’ future-period compensation to their current actions, affect employees’ construal level mindsets. A construal level mindset refers to the abstractness of an individual’s mental representation of an object, event, or action. A high-level construal has been shown to benefit various types of decisions and behaviors, such as creative performance, negotiation, and knowledge transfer. Using an experiment, I find that communication of the causal linkages increases employees’ construal levels regardless of whether incentives tie employees’ future-period compensation to their current actions. The findings suggest that firms can use the communication of the causal linkages, a relatively low-cost management control compared with incentives, to capitalize on the various decisional and behavioral benefits of high-level construal mindsets

(Z)-1-Phenyl-3-(3-pyridyl­meth­ylamino)­but-2-en-1-one

The reaction of 3-C5H4NCH2NH2 and C6H5COCH2COCH3 affords the title compound, C16H16N2O. The O=C—C=C—N portion is essentially planar [maximum deviation = 0.046 (2) Å] and is aligned at dihedral angles of 22.6 (1) and 78.9 (1)° to the phenyl and pyridyl rings, respectively. The N—H and O=C groups are linked by an intra­molecular hydrogen bond. In the crystal, C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds and C—H⋯π inter­actions occur

1,1′-Bis(1-acetyl-5-methyl-1H-pyrazol-3-yl)ferrocene

The title compound, [Fe(C11H11N2O)2], crystallizes with two independent mol­ecules in the asymmetric unit which have have different conformations. In one mol­ecule, the two ferrocene cyclo­penta­dienyl rings are fully eclipsed and the two pyrazole rings are syn to each other; in the other, the two cyclo­penta­dienyl rings are synclinal and the pyrazole rings are anti. In both mol­ecules, the acetyl group attached to the pyrazole ring is oriented away from the iron–cyclo­penta­dienyl group of ferrocene

Ethyl (Z)-4-ferrocenyl-2-(4-hy­droxy­anilino)-4-oxobutenoate

In the title compound, [Fe(C5H5)(C17H16NO4)], the O=C—C=C—N mean plane is twisted with respect to the mean planes of the benzene and substituted cyclo­penta­dienyl rings by 44.2 (2) and 13.8 (3)°, respectively. Furthermore, the O=C—C=C—N mean plane and the O=C—O(ester) plane make a dihedral angle of 55.5 (6)°. Consistent with this large dihedral angle, the linking C—C bond [1.507 (6) Å] does not show any (delocalized) double-bond character

Learning to suppress likely distractor locations in visual search is driven by the local distractor frequency

Salient but task-irrelevant distractors interfere less with visual search when they appear in a display region where distractors have appeared more frequently in the past (‘distractor-location probability cueing’). This effect could reflect the (re-)distribution of a global, limited attentional ‘inhibition resource’. Accordingly, changing the frequency of distractor appearance in one display region should also affect the magnitude of interference generated by distractors in a different region. Alternatively, distractor-location learning may reflect a local response (e.g., ‘habituation’) to distractors occurring at a particular location. In this case, the local distractor frequency in one display region should not affect distractor interference in a different region. To decide between these alternatives, we conducted three experiments in which participants searched for an orientation-defined target while ignoring a more salient orientation distractor that occurred more often in one vs. another display region. Experiment 1 varied the ratio of distractors appearing in the frequent vs. rare regions (60/40–90/10), with a fixed global distractor frequency. The results revealed the cueing effect to increase with increasing probability ratio. In Experiments 2 and 3, one (‘test’) region was assigned the same local distractor frequency as in one of the conditions of Experiment 1, but a different frequency in the other region – dissociating local from global distractor frequency. Together, the three experiments showed that distractor interference in the test region was not significantly influenced by the frequency in the other region, consistent with purely local learning. We discuss the implications for theories of statistical distractor-location learning