Organizational Entrainment of Project Launch: Empirical Evidence from Chinese Real Estate Industry

Abstract

As entrainment theory often indicates, launching new projects at appropriate timing is critical for organizations to succeed in market competition. Despite this widely recognized concept by case studies in the organizational context, there lacks empirical evidence to support how this entrainment process is formulated by internal or external organizational activities. In the present study, we reveal the entrainment process that how organizational attributes and environmental favorableness influence projects’ launch pace or timing decisions. We empirically examine such propositions through survival analysis with 90,755 observations of residential development projects of 149 real estate firms in China. Specifically, we find that organization inertia and resource munificence will decelerate and accelerate the timing of project launch, while external environmental favorableness can both directly accelerate the timing of project launch and strengthen the main effects of organization inertia and resource munificence on the timing of project launch.