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We examine the moderating effect of industry clockspeed on the relationship between strategic schemas, strategic flexibility and firm performance. We employ two key properties of strategic schemas: complexity and focus. Using a sample of 225 firms from 14 industries, we show that the pattern of relationships among the theoretical constructs is different in fast-and slow-clockspeed industries. The results suggest that complexity of strategic schemas promotes strategic flexibility and success in fast clockspeed industries, whereas focus of strategic schemas fosters strategic persistence, which is effective in slow-clockspeed industries.

This study addresses an apparent disconnect between two views of strategic action: the ‘economic view,’ which contends that industry structure is the primary influence on strategic action, and the ‘cognitive view,’ which suggests that managerial cognition drives strategic action. We argue that this disconnect has created artificial boundaries between the two perspectives and has limited our ability to develop holistic explanations of strategic action. In response, we develop an integrated model that answers two questions: 1) Does industry context affect managerial cognition? 2) Does managerial cognition mediate the relationship between industry context and strategic responses to environmental changes? To examine these questions, we study the relationship between industry velocity, the structure of top management's cognitive representation of the environment, and the speed of response to environmental events. We find that industry velocity influences the structure of cognitive representations, which in turn influence the speed of response to environmental events. These results support our contention that both industry and cognition variables are critical in developing explanations of strategic actions. These results have implications for our understanding of the development of top managers' beliefs, the relationship between beliefs and action, and the nature of the complex relationship between industry context, managerial cognition, and strategic action. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Using the five factor model (FFM) of personality, we delineate two distinct roles of CEO personality in managing strategic change: initiating strategic change and determining the performance effects of strategic change implementation. Based on data from 120 smalland medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ecuador, we found that some FFM traits of CEOs influenced initiation only (extraversion and openness), others similarly influenced initiation and performance effects of implementation (emotional stability and agreeableness), and still others had opposing effects on initiation and effective implementation (conscientiousness). These results point to a dual role of CEO FFM of personality in managing strategic change, and they indicate the differences in CEO FFM traits needed to initiate strategic change and those needed to improve the performance effects of strategic change implementation.

Research summary: we examine how the interplay between executive temporal depth (time horizons that executives consider when contemplating past and future events) and industry velocity (the rate at which new opportunities emerge and disappear in an industry) shapes competitive aggressiveness (a firm's propensity to challenge rivals directly and intensely in order to maintain or improve its market position) and firm performance. Based on panel data (from 1995 to 2000) from 258 firms in 23 industries, we found that executive temporal depth exhibited different patterns of relationships with competitive aggressiveness in low-and high-velocity industries. Moreover, competitive aggressiveness had a positive main effect on firm performance but this effect was stronger in high-velocity industries than in low-velocity industries. Managerial summary:The results of this article show that executives need to consider different past and future time horizons to enhance competitive aggressiveness and firm performance in fast changing and slow changing industries. In fast changing industries, executives with short-term thinking about the past and moderate-term thinking about the future maximize competitive aggressiveness and performance of their firms. In contrast, in slow changing environments, executives with long-term past and long-term future thinking achieve superior competitive aggressiveness and firm performance. Keywords: Competitive dynamics, temporal orientation, executive cognition, and competitive aggressivenessThis article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved Based on the Austrian view of the market as a disequilibrium system (Kirzner, 1997), competitive dynamics research rests on the premise that changing conditions render a firm's positioning in a competitive market temporary either in the short run or the long run D'Aveni, Dagnino and Smith, 2010;Ferrier, 2001; Ferrier, Smith, and Grimm, 1999). This inherently temporal nature of competitive phenomena has brought the issue of time to the forefront of research on competitive dynamics. This research has identified two sets of temporal forces governing the creation and erosion of competitive advantage -macro and micro. Industry-level macro temporal forces (e.g., hypercompetition, dynamism and velocity) define the time windows of opportunities available for incumbents to establish new advantages and negate the advantages of competitors and impose different levels of pressure on incumbents to retaliate (Chen et al., 2010b;D'Aveni et al., 2010; Davis, Eisenhardt and Bingham, 2009; Katila, Chen, and Piezunka, 2012;Rindova, Ferrier, and Wiltbank, 2010). Micro temporal forces, in the form of speed, intensity, timing and sequences of actions taken by individual firms, determine their competitive advantages over rivals and in turn their survival and success (Derfus et al., 2008;Ferrier, 2001). Firms that take speedy and frequent competitive actions are better positioned competitively and show superior performance (Katila and Chen, 2008;Rindova et al., 2...

How CEOs think and feel about time may have a big influence on their firms' strategies. We examine how two distinct CEO temporal dispositions-time urgency (the feeling of being chronically hurried) and pacing style (one's pattern of effort over time in working toward deadlines)-each influence corporate entrepreneurship, a key strategic behavior. We propose that CEOs' temporal leadership-how they manage the temporal aspects of top management teams' activities-mediates the relationships between their temporal dispositions and corporate entrepreneurship-firms' innovation, corporate venturing, and strategic renewal activities. Using a sample of 129 small and medium-sized Chinese firms, we find that CEOs' time urgency is positively related to their temporal leadership, which in turn is positively related to corporate entrepreneurship. We also examine the effects of three distinct pacing styles: earlyaction, meaning the CEO exerts the most effort early in the task process and relaxes as the deadline nears; steady-action, meaning the CEO spreads out effort evenly across the time allotted; and deadline-action, meaning the CEO is most active as the deadline nears. We find that the deadline-action style inhibits CEOs' temporal leadership, but the steady-action and early-action styles have similar effects on their temporal leadership. This study explicates the dispositional basis of executives' subjective views of time, demonstrating how CEOs' temporal dispositions shape firms' behaviors.