Time in Organizational Research

Robert A. Roe, Mary J. Waller, Stewart R. Clegg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134045181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Today there is widespread awareness of the fact that time has been under-investigated in organizational studies. This book addresses the need to bridge the gap between the predominantly "timeless" theories and models that scholars have produced and the daily experiences of employees and managers, in which time is salient and extremely important. These chapters offer a broad range of concepts, models, and methods that are tailored to this purpose.

The first part of the book is devoted to the way in which people in organizations manage time, summarizing research findings, presenting novel ideas on a broad range of issues and examining issues such as whether time can be managed, how people are affected by deadlines and how do strategic changes in organizations affect individuals' careers and sense of identity. The second part is about time as embedded in collective behaviours and experiences, and in temporal regimes linked to organizational structures. It discusses ways to study such collective patterns and their relationships to management practices, and addresses topics such as sensemaking of dynamic events, rhythmic patterns and their impact on organizational effectiveness, time in industrial relations, and power and temporal hegemony. A third part with a single concluding chapter looks at possibilities for integrating the various approaches and provides suggestions for future research. This book adopts a pluralistic approach, arguing against timeless conceptions in organizational theory and behaviour and instead emphasising the importance of temporal analysis.

1
Introduction

Robert A. Roe, Stewart R. Clegg and Mary J. Waller

Organizational research, like much social science research, has for most of its history been characterized by a rudimentary attention to time and time-related issues. Given the overwhelming importance of time in people’s lives as well as in the operation of organizations, such relative lack of consideration is both paradoxical and confusing. Organizational processes and structures are built around daily and weekly working hours, rhythmic cycles of individual and collective activity, deadlines and production times, and so on. Scheduling and synchronizing activities is a challenge for individual employees seeking to balance the demands of household, daily life and work. For managers, the issues are often posed in terms of managing the entrainment of activities of people in different parts of the firm with those of customers and suppliers. Gaining optimal outcomes is as much a challenge as coping with the effects of misfits – for example, delays and time-stress. One might think that the temporal aspects of everyday human life would saturate the field of management and organization theory but, instead, one is more likely to find that is relatively timeless knowledge which fills our textbooks and journals.

Since the end of the last century, an increasing number of scholars have expressed concerns about this relative neglect of time and have pondered the value of concepts and theories in which a consideration of time is lacking. A number of recent publications have increased awareness of the necessity to incorporate time in theoretical models and research designs (Ancona, Goodman, Lawrence & Tushman 2001; George & Jones 2000; Mitchell & James 2001). There has been a rediscovery of earlier research on time that had remained unrecognized (e.g., Bergh 1993; McGrath & Kelly 1986), and proposals to study temporality are now being launched from many perspectives (e.g., Avolio 2007; Eaton 2004; Fried & Slowik 2004; Mathieu & Schulze 2006). We may therefore be witnessing a temporal transition – from a period in which temporality was only occasionally and partially addressed, to one in which it will be an indispensable part of organizational theory and research.

Whether this book will be seen as a milestone marking the beginning of an époque of greater attention for time and temporality in organization and management research is impossible to say. What is evident, however, is that it attests to the changes that are currently taking place in various research domains. While several authors start their contribution with comments about the lack of time-based research, they all move beyond retrospective criticism and present new proposals and exemplars – for concepts, taxonomies, paradigms, models, hypotheses and theories that account for certain dimensions of time. In addition, they propose a variety of ways of describing, measuring, analyzing and interpreting organizational phenomena from a temporal perspective. For those with an interest in temporal research, the approaches and methods presented in this volume should be an invaluable source of orientation and inspiration. Even though the accumulated knowledge of how to study time in organizations is limited, what is gathered here offers much that the present and next generation of researchers can profit from and build upon.

Time: simple or complex?

The concept of time, as we know it from everyday life, seems deceptively simple. We all know what time is and are able to ‘deal’ with time, without great effort. The fact that time is in our behaviors and in the patterned events of organizational and societal life seems self-evident and does not pose any problems of understanding. That time has so rarely been studied may actually stem from the belief that there is nothing special about it that deserves to be studied. Familiarity with the scientific analysis of time is sufficient to make this naïve view vanish. Pinning down what time means and defining it in a formal way is a vexing undertaking. One reason is that time has many appearances that lend themselves to numerous phenomenological descriptions, conceptual categorizations, and methods of analysis. As a consequence, the researcher is confronted with a large volume of philosophical works on time, and with a great diversity of views about how time should be conceived and studied. Indeed, there is considerable disagreement – sometimes erupting in heated polemics – among researchers about what time means, what is interesting about it, and how one can gain valid and useful knowledge about it.

While we would never underestimate the capacity for scientists to enjoy a good disagreement, one optimistic scenario for the future might be that these disparate views will sooner or later converge into a limited number of well-recognized streams that create a basis for a certain degree of consensus. But, perhaps just as likely, diversity will grow and the current discourse will prove only to be the prelude to a period of conceptual and methodological differentiation that will take a much longer time to settle. We are not able to foretell which scenario will hold, but the variety of temporal facets that are highlighted in this book and the many ways in which the authors propose to organize them suggests that efforts to move away from a simple conception of time, certainly that of calendar and clock time, is time ‘well spent’.

All edited collections strive for thematic harmony. To facilitate the achievement of this ideal, we have organized the volume in two main parts. The first part of the book takes the issue of managing time as its theme. It deals with the way in which people, as individuals and members of groups, deal with time, and how their behaviors unfold over time. The second part is about time as it is embedded in patterns of organizational behavior and experience, and in the temporal regimes that emerge from this embeddedness. It addresses time mainly in collective behaviors that shape and are shaped by organizational structures. There is a third part, with a single concluding chapter, that presents a comprehensive view of the field, points to possibilities for potential integration, and provides suggestions for future organizational research.

Managing time: people and practices

The topic treated in Chapter 2, ‘Time management: logic, effectiveness and challenges’, written by Claessens, Roe and Rutte, is time management. While less than fifty years old, the notion of time management has gained great popularity and is intuitively grasped by nearly everyone who has ever felt the pressure of too many things to do and too little time to do them in. From a scientific point of view, there are many aspects of time management that require clarification. What is time? Can time be managed? What aspects of time, in what sense, are most amenable to control, and which are hardest to capture? The authors start with a discussion of these basic questions before presenting definitions of time management and discussing the processes involved in it. Claessens and colleagues note that the term time management is somewhat misleading, since it is the activity of the individual worker (or the work team) that is managed and not time itself. Time management can best be understood from a self-regulation perspective (Boekaerts & Corno 2005; Boekaerts, Maes & Karoly 2005), in which people aim to regulate their activities not only with regard to content, amount and quality, but also with regard to time. The authors present a model of time management that comprises four processes: assessment, planning, monitoring and executing. These processes and the ways in which they can be supported by operational techniques are described in some detail.

In spite of its popularity in organizational settings, time management has attracted very little empirical research. As a consequence, much is as yet unknown and thus in need of investigation. Claessens and colleagues summarize the research that has been done, and they succinctly summarize the empirical work that they have recently carried out. It is clear that time management has the potential to improve the timeliness of performance and to reduce the effort spent on work, thus benefiting the working individual, the organization and its clients. But the effectiveness of time management training is still weakly supported. The chapter concludes with a challenging research agenda that not only addresses issues of effectiveness, the main target in organizational settings, but also raises theoretical issues that can improve our understanding of how time is woven into the activities of organizations and their members. Unlike earlier work on time management, Claessens et al. address not only individuals but also groups, which, they suggest, calls for concepts and methods other than those presently deployed in individual time-management research.

Chapter 3, ‘Temporal aspects of processes in ad-hoc groups: a conceptual schema and some research examples’, written by Tschan, McGrath, Semmer, Arametti, Bogenstätter and Marsch, considers temporal facets that normally remain hidden and yet are critical for the successful performance of work tasks, especially in teams. The authors draw our attention to so-called ‘temporal requirements’ – exigencies regarding the timing of particular actions that a team has to perform. There is some similarity with the notion of deadlines, but the time scope is much smaller and includes multiple requirements – for example, regarding onset, speed, duration – that must be observed simultaneously. The authors highlight the fact that the temporal requirements of the group task have profound implications for the temporal allocation and coordination of individual tasks. Poor coordination can produce complete failure at the team level. To identify temporal task requirements, Tschan and colleagues propose to use hierarchical task analysis for groups. They describe the methodology and illustrate the richness of temporal parameters it produces.

The authors describe two empirical studies of medical emergency teams in a Swiss hospital, which demonstrate not only the temporal requirements for urgent and timely action but also some of the factors involved in team processes that determine whether or not these requirements are met. As these teams deal with the resuscitation of patients with cardiac arrest (performed in a simulated setting), it becomes clear that meeting the requirements, often on a timescale of seconds, can be a matter of life or death.

In Chapter 4, ‘The weekly cycle of work and rest: a diary study’, Zijlstra and Rook introduce the reader to another topic from everyday organizational life that enjoys great familiarity among working people, yet which research is only just beginning to unravel: the weekly work and rest cycle. Here we are confronted with the notion of cyclicity: processes recurring after a certain amount of elapsed time that are under the control of internal and external triggers. The chapter does not deal with the distribution of work and rest periods within the single workday, (a topic which has been widely investigated previously), but rather with their distribution over the workweek. The choice of this focus illuminates an important point for temporal research: the dynamics of a particular phenomenon can be quite different when looked at from different timeframes (Roe 2005). For example, a simple notion such as ‘taking a rest’ acquires different meanings and involves different processes, depending on whether one deals with micro-breaks, breaks in the working day, rest-days, holidays, and so on.

Zijlstra and Rook base their study on a theoretical model, rooted in work psychology, in which people’s energetic resources are utilized through work and other effortful activities and are replenished by rest, particularly sleep. Fatigue is used as an inverse indicator of recovery: the better the recovery, the lower the fatigue. The authors present the results of an empirical study, for which employees of three Dutch companies completed a daily diary during seven days of a typical week, from Monday through Sunday. The emphasis in this research is on time, in a number of ways. First, time is present in the number of hours ‘spent’ on work, household, sport, social and other activities, and in the time available for sleep. Secondly, time is visible in the development of fatigue over the consecutive days of the week. The results show a clear pattern of gradual decline of fatigue during the workweek, but disconfirm popular ideas about the importance of time expenditure on different activities. For instance, more time spent on work and travel does not seem to develop more fatigue, while low-effort and social activities do. Time devoted to effortful activities such as household duties and child care appears to be beneficial for recovery. The authors conclude that clock time is not all that counts; qualitative aspects of people’s activity, including the quality of sleep, seem to be more important than sheer quantity – a statement that is congruent with positions taken by Sabelis and others in the second part of the book.

Chapter 5, ‘Pacing styles, personality and performance’, by Gevers, Claessens, Van Eerde and Rutte, introduces the notion of deadlines and focuses on one of the mechanisms used by people striving to manage their work activities so that they are completed in time: pacing. The term pacing essentially refers to people’s distribution of effort over time – more precisely, the interval between the moment people start working on a task and the deadline for achieving it. The focus of the chapter is on the definition and measurement of ‘pacing styles’ – the tendencies of people to distribute their effort in a particular way. For example, some people prefer to do most of the work that is due at an early stage, leaving themselves sufficient time for reflection and completion before the deadline, while others prefer to postpone the work and start working hard when the deadline is near. These and several other less-intuitive pacing styles are defined and measured with the help of easily interpreted graphic scales. Three studies were conducted: two among individuals and one on teams, using these scales. Evidence is presented on the relative preference among people for various pacing styles, as well as analysis of results concerning their effectiveness. Among the issues discussed is the question of how teams accommodate the differences between members with contrasting pacing styles.

In Chapter 6, ‘Polychronicity in work teams: a theoretical examination of antecedents and consequences’, Kaplan draws our attention to the preference that people have for doing several tasks either in parallel, within the same period of time, or serially, one after the other. Most of the research on this preference, designated by Bluedorn as ‘polychronicity’, has taken a...

Table of contents

• Routledge studies in management, organisation and society
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Managing time
• Part II Managed by time
• Part III Combining perspectives
• Author index
• Subject index