It's About Time! Top Management Team Temporal Orientation and Competitive Behaviors

Abstract

Time emerges as a very important topic in competitive dynamics. However, previous research has rarely examined how executives' perceptions of time shaped competitive behaviors. Building on the subjective perspective in competitive dynamics and upper echelons theory, I argue for a subjective perspective of time and propose that top management teams' (TMT) temporal orientation can explain additional variance in competitive actions. I investigate this research topic in two essays. In essay one, I focus on TMT temporal focus (the extent to which a TMT as a whole devotes attention to past, present and future time frames) and examine the relationships among TMT temporal focus, competitive aggressiveness (a firm's tendency to initiate actions frequently and quickly at a given time) and firm performance. In essay two, I investigate how TMT polychronicity (the extent to which a TMT as a whole prefers to engage in multiple tasks simultaneously) interacts with past performance and industry uncertainty in shaping competitive action complexity (the degree to which a firm engages in many different types of actions), nonconformity (the degree to which a firm's competitive actions deviate from industry norms) and intensity (the number of actions a firm initiates at a given time). I test these hypotheses using survey data from Chinese small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).%%%%Ph.D., Business Administration – Drexel University, 2014