Leader pre- and procrastination, temporal resource utilization, and leader-follower relationship

Abstract

With emergent attention on pre-crastination (PRE), together with a familiar and widely discussed proclivity – procrastination (PRO), a growing need is evident to examine these constructs – their definitions, conceptualizations, and manifestations of paradoxical nature, especially when these seemingly maladaptive behaviors displayed by managerial roles in organizations. Given the central role of time embedded in PRE/PRO, and the importance of temporal activities in organizational settings, the present work integrates literature in PRE and PRO, leadership, and temporal resource utilization to present a framework mapping PRE/PRO to time in four conditions: temporal resource compression, temporal resource suppression, temporal resource exploitation, and temporal resource exploration. Built on this foundation, the second half of this work proposes a multiphase process model explaining how temporal variances initiated by leaders could shape followers’ perception of, responses to, and evaluation of the leaders and leader-follower relationships. The present work thus advances the literature by infusing PRE/PRO-related temporal characteristics into leadership research, providing a perceptual framework that explains followers’ reactions, investigating the role of temporal resource utilization as salient contextual factors in altering followers’ perceptions, and offering new propositions that have the potential to provide a more complete understanding of the integrative literature and its implications for organizations.