Center for Effective Organization TIME FLIES LIKE AN ARROW: TRACING ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF TEMPORAL ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

1 INTRODUCTION Time has recently become a more central focus in management research and practice. Time to market has become a critical issue in many industries, with ever shortening new product development times. New terms are being coined in organizational research like industry " clockspeed " which innovation occurs, and " high velocity " (Eisenhardt & Bourgeois, 1988), referring to the need to make decisions in less time. In the popular press, references are littered across the pages referring to " Internet time " and " doing business the dot-com way. " Time horizons for " dot-coms " and other high-tech organizations are contracted in the face of competitive pressures. The recognition of the impact of time pressure and speed on organizational life is not new, as noted by W. R. Greg (1877) on " Life at High Pressure " (p. 263): " Beyond doubt, the most salient characteristic of life in this latter portion of the 19 th century is its SPEED – what we call its hurry, the rate at which we move, the high-pressure at which we work – and the question to be considered is, first, whether this rapid rate is in itself a good; and, next, whether it is worth the price we pay for it – a price reckoned up, and not very easy to ascertain. " However, little direct attention to time in organizational research occurred until relatively recently. Recognizing the importance of time and timing to organizations, over a decade ago, researchers began calling for greater attention to temporal variables in organizational research Despite increased focus on time in several areas of organizational research, relatively little direct attention to time has occurred in the area of organizational culture (notable made clear the connection between time and organizational culture when he commented that " there is probably no more important 2 category for cultural analysis than the study of how time is conceived and used in a group or organization " (p. 114). Time has often been an implicit element in models and descriptions of organizational culture, but is rarely the focus of cultural analysis at the organizational level. Despite the potentially potent impact time can have on organizational behavior, and the increasing awareness of the importance of time in organizational behavior research, surprisingly little direct attention has been paid to temporal elements of organizational culture. In this chapter we examine how organizational …