In the Eye of the Beholder: Top Managers’ Long-Term Orientation, Industry Context, and Decision-Making Processes

Abstract

Time orientation matters. While a temporal perspective is widely recognized as an important lens in strategic management research, few studies have explored how top managers’ temporal orientation affects strategic decision-making processes. We propose that top managers’ subjective perception of time, specifically, their long-term orientation, positively affects the comprehensiveness, speed, and creativity of strategic decision-making processes and that industry context moderates these relationships. Drawing on the organization-environment fit perspective and associated compatibility and temporal fit mechanisms, we found considerable support for our hypotheses in the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries in China. Our findings reinforce the perspective that temporal referent points act as anchors for strategic decision-making processes.

Temporal Strategies and Firms’ Speedy Responses to COVID‐19

“…With healthcare organizations in Asia experimenting with new approaches to testing therapies, they have been switching from a cost orientation to more of a time orientation in building speed-by-design strategies and structures (Lin et al, 2019;Tan, 2020). Firms have been learning to do more work "in parallel," by resequencing steps so they can be done at about the same time, with problems dealt with "on the fly" as one hospital executive from China put it.…”

“…Having a time orientation can shift the organization's strategies toward more speed and flexible methods with respect to many aspects of product development, testing, and evaluation (Lin et al, 2019).…”

“…Temporal strategies hold that rather than providing the most value for the lowest cost, organizations should provide value in the lowest practical time (Shi and Prescott, 2011). This shift from a cost orientation to a time orientation, is suited to the pandemic's demands (Baker and Koons, 2020;Lin et al, 2019).…”

Achieving Temporal Ambidexterity in New Ventures

“…Second, we examine how temporal ambidexterity can be achieved in the context of new ventures. In particular, we explain how founder CEO managerial capabilities serve as the base for temporal ambidexterity of their ventures, thus enriching the growing discussion on how top managers contribute to organizational level strategies (Lin et al, ). As new ventures are becoming an increasingly important engine for economic growth and social development, our research provides timely managerial implications for entrepreneurs to reconcile intertemporal tensions and succeed.…”

Subjective time in organizations: Conceptual clarification, integration, and implications for future research

“…Although either construct has been studied frequently, the aforementioned jingle–jangle fallacies are prevalent in this research. As shown in Table , the same label of “(future) temporal orientation” was used to describe both temporal focus (e.g., Cojuharenco et al, ; Fried & Slowik, ) and temporal depth (e.g., Das & Teng, , ; Lin et al, )—the jingle fallacy. In the meantime, different labels such as “time perspective” (e.g., Przepiorka, ; Waller et al, ) were used to describe temporal focus ; “temporal distance” (Cojuharenco et al, ), “short‐termism” (Marginson & McAulay, ), and “temporal myopia” (Miller, ) were employed to refer to temporal depth —the jangle fallacy.…”