Development and Validation of the Chinese Employee Intertemporal Decision-Making Ability Scale

Objective: Intertemporal decision-making ability refers to an individual’s capacity to evaluate and integrate temporally distributed outcomes, regulate goal-directed behavior, and construct future representations in intertemporal choice contexts. This construct reflects a core psychological processing capacity rather than a mere preference for specific choice outcomes. It plays a critical role in employees’ long-term performance management, career development, and self-regulation. However, existing research lacks standardized measurement instruments that directly assess intertemporal decision-making ability among employee populations. Therefore, the present study aimed to develop and validate a structurally clear, reliable, and valid scale of employees’ intertemporal decision-making ability applicable to Chinese organizational contexts. Methods: Using a sample of full-time employees from China, this study developed the scale based on a three-process framework of intertemporal decision making, encompassing three core psychological mechanisms: cognitive control, value evaluation, and future representation. Exploratory factor analysis (N = 433) and confirmatory factor analysis (N = 281) were conducted to examine the scale’s factor structure. Impulsivity and job autonomy were employed as criterion variables to assess criterion-related validity. Results: The findings supported a three-factor structure comprising career executive control, long-term career reward trade-off, and career future representation. The final scale included 14 items. The Employee Intertemporal Decision-Making Ability Scale demonstrated good internal consistency and stable structural validity at both the overall and dimensional levels. In addition, intertemporal decision-making ability was significantly negatively correlated with impulsivity and significantly positively correlated with job autonomy, providing support for criterion-related validity. Conclusions: The Employee Intertemporal Decision-Making Ability Scale developed in this study demonstrates satisfactory reliability and validity and can serve as an instrument for assessing employees’ intertemporal decision-making ability.