Time and Work, Volume 2

How time impacts groups, organizations and methodological choices

Abbie J. Shipp, Yitzhak Fried, Abbie J. Shipp, Yitzhak Fried

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317756347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The concept of time is a crucial filter through which we understand any events or phenomena; nothing exists outside of time. It conditions not only the question of 'when', but also influences the 'what, how and why'of our ideas about management. And yet management scholars have rarely considered this 'temporal lens' in understanding how time affects employees at work, or the organizations for which they work.

This 2-volume set provides a fresh, temporal perspective on some of the most important and thriving areas in management research today. Volume 1 considers how time impacts the individual, and includes chapters on identity, emotion, motivation, stress and creativity. Volume 2 considers time in context with the organization, exploring a temporal understanding of leadership, HRM, entrepreneurship, teams and cross-cultural issues.

There is an overall concern with the practical implications of understanding individuals and organizations within the most relevant timeframes, while the two volumes provide an actionable research agenda for the future. This is a highly significant contribution to management theory and research, and will be important reading for all students and researchers of Organizational Behavior, Organizational Psychology, Occupational Psychology, Business and Management and HRM.

1
Time research in management

How time impacts groups, organizations and methodological choices

Yitzhak Fried and Abbie J. Shipp

As noted in the introduction to Volume 1, we created this two-volume book to bring together research on time and organizational management in a purposeful way, allowing experts in each field to become “temporal ambassadors” to their respective content areas. In Volume 1, How Time Impacts Individuals, the chapters focused primarily on individual-level issues related to time and work. In contrast, in the current volume, the chapters address primarily group-, organization-, and national-level topics related to time. In addition we included a chapter on methodological implications for temporal research.

The two volumes’ consideration of temporal issues at multiple levels (individuals, groups, organizations, and national cultures) provides a rich platform for future research, as discussed in the different chapters. Moreover, the multilevel analysis of temporal context (which is especially apparent in this volume) raises additional conceptual and methodological questions that should be addressed in future research.

Concerning conceptual issues, an interesting question is how do characteristics of time at one level affect temporal issues at another level? Thus, for example, how does the development of organizational routines over time (Turner, this volume) affect leader-follower relationships (e.g., how quickly these relationships develop; Day, this volume)? The picture may be mixed: evolvement of higher organizational routines may, on one hand, slow the evolvement of creative, “out of the box” leader-member exchange relationships, but, on the other hand, may provide the predictability and support for quicker development of trustworthy relationships between leaders and followers. Another conceptual time-related issue pertains to the effect of the underlying temporal dimensions of national cultures (Fulmer, Crosby, & Gelfand, this volume) on individuals’ accommodations and reactions to these cultures. Here again the picture may be mixed, contingent on the level of exposure of individuals to different cultural dimensions during their career. In our global economy, individuals who are routinely exposed to multiple cultures during their career are likely to develop multiple time perspectives that can be internalized and successfully applied in different cultural contexts. On the other hand, those who work mainly within one culture are likely to internalize the time perspective of this particular culture, resulting in less flexibility in adjusting to other cultural perspectives when required.

The foregoing two examples refer to the effect of macro-level phenomena on micro- or meso-level temporal phenomena. However, the effect can also occur in the reverse direction, such that, for example, dynamic changes at the individual or team levels may affect the dynamic changes at the organizational level (Ploy-hart & Hale, this volume). To illustrate, one strong and prevalent source of stress and strain is work-family conflict, in which the pressure to spend increasingly more time at work adversely affects family life (Sonnentag, Pundt, & Albrecht, 2014). Over time, work-family conflict leads to increased levels of stress and strain (ibid.). The increasingly adverse effect of work-family conflict can be expected to affect organizational human resource policies and practices, including their temporal characteristics (Ployhart & Hale, this volume). For example, in recruiting potential applicants who value work-family balance (e.g., generation Y) organizations may find it useful to initially emphasize both its expectations for employees to commit themselves to high work quality, and the organization’s commitment to work-family balance through supportive human resources (HR) policies and practices such as availability of child care facilities, flexible work arrangements, or work from home. At later stages organizations may find it useful to shift to more specific information about the job tasks and the work environment (cf. Ployhart & Hale, 2014). In this particular example, individuals’ increased concerns about the effect of work-family imbalance over time affect the organizational recruiting policies and practices over time.

However, one key take-away from the collection of chapters as a whole is that we clearly need research to explore how temporal phenomena at different levels (micro, meso, macro) influence one another. Further, we need more research on how these cross-level relationships affect organizational outcomes. Such ideas are complex but promising as researchers continue to uncover the multilevel and temporal aspects of these topics.

Beyond the impact of time on groups, organizations, and cultures, this volume also addresses the importance of time in methodological choices. Methodologically, future research on temporal issues will benefit from incorporating both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Significant advances in the power of statistical methods should enable researchers to rely more on quantitative methods in exploring temporal theoretical issues (Chan, this volume; Kozlowski, Chao, Grand, Braun, & Kuljanin, 2013). However, the complexity of temporal research also supports the value of pursuing qualitative analysis such as interviews or case studies (e.g., Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). The benefit of such qualitative methods is not only in supporting and deepening the knowledge generated from quantitative studies, but also in potentially providing new substantive directions for research on temporal issues.

Overview of chapters

As we indicated in our introduction to Volume 1, the chapters in the two volumes were written by authors from different parts of the world, including North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, representing a diversity of views on research on time in work contexts. We now provide some detail on each chapter in this volume.

In Chapter 2, Mathieu, Kukenberger, and D’Innocenzo analyze three approaches to studying temporal influences on team functioning. Specifically, time represents a historical context within which teams operate. Second, time is considered as a developmental marker signaling teams’ movement from birth to death. Third, time is considered as a cyclical phenomenon in which teams perform different activities at different periods of performance activities. These three approaches independently and collectively indicate that teams are doing different things at different times, and thus that different processes (e.g., planning, execution, interpersonal dynamics) have differential effects on work accomplishment at different times. The authors further discuss some methodological issues that researchers should consider when pursuing temporal research designs, including predictor-criterion time lags and aggregation periods. They conclude with theoretical, research, and applied implications of systematically incorporating time in research on teams.

In Chapter 3, Day focuses on leadership in the context of time. The author analyzes the influence of time in four key areas of leadership research and theory: (a) leader behavior concerning the appropriate level of time lag between actions and effects and related measurement implications; (b) leader emergence with regard to how followers’ perceptions form and change over time; (c) leader-follower relationships concerning how quickly or slowly these relationships develop and change over time; and (d) leader development – how leaders acquire and develop leadership capacity and capabilities over time. The author further discusses the value of intensive longitudinal data with an appropriate number of measurements and appropriate intervals between measurements.

In Chapter 4, Fulmer, Crosby, and Gelfand focus on cross-cultural perspectives and time. The authors focus on several issues associated with cross-cultural and temporal dimensions. They first introduce and discuss a number of important temporal dimensions that vary across cultures, including time as a silent language; past, present, and future orientation; event time and clock time; pace of life and time as a cultural metaphor. They then discuss antecedents that may explain why people perceive and approach time differently across cultures. These antecedents include variables that are inherent within a culture, such as values, religion, social structure, and language, as well as variables that are related to the environment, such as natural climate and social and economic conditions. This is followed by an elaborated discussion on the effect of cross-cultural differences in temporal orientation on micro- and macro-related outcomes. Concerning the micro level, the authors analyze how these differences affect individuals’ psychological, behavioral, and health outcomes, as well as negotiation, teamwork, and job performance. Concerning the macro level, the authors discuss the effect of these differences on human resource management, strategic planning, marketing, and the economic development of countries. Finally, the authors discuss the measurement challenges in examining temporal differences in the cross-cultural context, and directions for future research at the intersection of culture and time.

In Chapter 5, Ployhart and Hale discuss how incorporating time into the field of human resources would improve the rigor of HR theories, research, and practice. The authors first review the HR field at both the micro and macro levels, indicating the lack of systematic incorporation of time in HR-related theory and research. The authors then provide a framework comprising the key principles of time, duration, timing, and temporal dynamics, which they use to make specific recommendations for incorporating time into the theory, design, and analysis of HR practices and resources. The authors analyze how key HR practices (recruitment, selection, training and development, compensation, and strategic human resources) may be changed if their temporal framework were adopted.

In Chapter 6, Gilbert focuses on the context of time in the area of entrepreneurship. The chapter specifically aims to enhance understanding of when entrepreneurial endeavors are undertaken, the activities involved, how long they endure, and how they are experienced. More specifically, the author suggests that individual entrepreneurship is fluid, in the sense that it occurs under unique timing considerations. The constantly evolving nature of the person-environment fit produces different contexts that can affect individuals’ readiness for entrepreneur-ship over time. Changes in individual knowledge, experience, and social networks affect the likelihood that individuals will pursue entrepreneurial endeavors at certain points in time. From a more macro perspective, the firm’s use of available resources at present determines how long that firm will survive into the future. It is therefore important to consider a firm’s founding, its current stage, and the decisions that are made as the venture moves forward to understand new venture performance. Concerning the issue of time and industry emergence, the length of time between inventions, initial commercialization, and mass market entry may provide significant information about the likelihood of success for entrepreneurial endeavors and the emergence of an industry. Future research is discussed concerning the influence of time on entrepreneurs, new ventures, and new industry emergence.

In Chapter 7, Turner analyzes how temporal perspectives contribute to the emergence and consequences of the important phenomenon of organizational routines, which are significant in explaining the stability versus dynamism of organizations’ behaviors, and their efficiency and effectiveness. More specifically, the chapter focuses on: (a) temporal antecedents of routines, including time as signal, resource, and state of mind; (b) the effect of time on the performance outcomes of routines, concerning both time as an outcome (e.g., how much time is required to perform a routine) and the effect of time on the impact of routines (e.g., how realization of value from routines can change over time); and (c) how routines evolve over time. The author further discusses the methods scholars have used to study temporal issues in routines, and in conclusion offers suggestions for how future research can further incorporate temporal perspectives to enhance our understanding of organizational routines and their effects.

In the eighth and final chapter, Chan discusses important methodological issues in the research of time. Specifically, the author focuses on the conceptual bases for methodological choices in studies on time, as they relate to the constructs of subjective and objective time, and to the temporal characteristics of time duration, number of time points and the intervals between them, time lag between events, time perspective and temporal depth, time urgency, and polychronicity. This is followed by an analysis of design, measurement, and data analysis issues. Concerning design issues, the author focuses on three key design issues: nature of the longitudinal change or time construct under study, descriptive versus explanatory goals in the study of the temporal phenomenon, and observational versus experimental intervention approaches to examine the temporal phenomenon. This is followed by an analysis of measurement issues, including specification of timescales for longitudinal change and time constructs, dimensionality of time constructs, and measurement invariance of responses and changes in construct dimensionality over time. Then data analysis issues are addressed, including assumptions of data analytical models, analysis of reliability and errors, and aggregation of observations across time. The chapter ends with a list of strategic issues for researchers to consider in order to develop the conceptual and methodological bases for the study on time.

Conclusion

Just as Volume 1 offered a number of ideas and suggestions for future research on time for individual-level aspects of work, so too do the chapters in this volume create numerous directions for future research at higher levels of analysis. Such innovative perspectives on topics such as leadership, culture, and human resources, as well as conceptual views of methodological choices, provide extant research with a number of recommendations for future work at the intersection of time and work. We hope that both volumes will serve as a basis for future research aimed at enriching our knowledge and understanding of the role of temporal issues at work.

References

Kozlowski, S. W., Chao, G. T., Grand, J. A., Braun, M. T., & Kuljanin, G. (2013). Advancing multilevel research design: Capturing the dynamics of emergence. Organizational Research Methods, 16, 581–615.

Orlikowski, W. J., & Yates, J. (2002). It’s about time: Temporal structuring in organizations. Organization Science, 13, 684–700.

Sonnentag, S., Pundt, A., & Albrecht, A. (2014). Temporal perspectives on job stress. In A. J. Shipp & Y. Fried (Eds.), Time and Work: How Time Impacts Individuals (Vol. 1). London: Psychology Press.

2
Time and teams

John E. Mathieu, Michael R. Kukenberger and Lauren D’Innocenzo

Open up the sporting papers of any newspaper and conventional wisdom will convey that teams take time to develop, great teams deliver in crunch time, and how you practice is how you play; or, in the words of Casey Stengel, “The team has come along slow but fast.” The scholarly literature is no different as the concept of time is ubiquitous in the study and application of teamwork. It is widely accepted that teams are dynamic entities that have a past, present, and future (McGrath, Arrow, & Berdahl, 2000). Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, and Jundt (2005, p. 519) observed, “Conceptually, team researchers have converged on a view of teams as complex, adaptive, dynamic systems. They exist in context as they perform across time. Over time and contexts, teams and their members continually cycle and recycle.” Similarly, Gully (2000, p. 35) emphasized that “to fully understand work teams, researchers must investigate how team dynamics develop and change over time.”

Mitchell and James (2001, p. 545) argued, “We believe that the management discipline needs to seriously consider issues of time, especially when events occur, in both theory and methods.” We submit that this is especially true for the study of work teams. Time comes in many different forms that have different yet related implications for teams. Several theories of temporal team dynamics have been advanced over the years (e.g., Gersick, 1988; Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001; Waller, 1999). More generally, Ancona, Okhuysen, and Perlow (2001) reviewed the management literature and argued that time is generally conceived of in three forms: 1) clock time; 2) developmental or growth patterns; and 3) performance cycles or episodes. “Clock-based time depicts a continuum as linear – infinitely divisible into objective, quantifiable units such that the units are homogenous, uniform, regular, precise, deterministic, and measurable” (Ancona et al., 2001, p. 514). Linear time unfolds as history, and therefore also subsumes other historical features and events to constitute a context that evolves and changes over time. In contrast, theories of team development suggest that teams qualitatively evolve over time as they move through various stages toward maturity. Examples of this paradigm include Tuckman’s (1965) forming-storming-norming-performing-adjourning framework, Gersick’s (1988) punctuated equilibrium conception, Morgan, Salas, and Glickman’s (1993) team evolution and maturation approach, and Kozlowski, Gully, Nason, and Smith’s (1999) theory of team compilation. Cyclical theories of team functioning suggests that events unfold in a recurring fashion over time in cycles or episodes as related to performance. Episodic time-based theories include McGrath’s (1991) Time, Interaction, and Performance, Ancona and Chong’s (1996) theory of entrainment, Waller’s (1999) theory of group adaptation to nonroutine events, and Marks et al.’s (2001) recurring phase model of team processes.

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