Introduction

Citation

Bluedorn, A.C. (1999), "Introduction", Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 14 No. 3/4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmp.1999.05014caa.001

Introduction

About the Guest EditorAllen C. Bluedorn is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a past member of the Academy of Management’s Board of Governors. He received three degrees from the University of Iowa: a BS in Sociology, an MA in Anthropology and a PhD in Sociology. His work on time, organizational culture, turnover, and other organization science topics has been published, or is in press, in several journals, including: the Academy of Management Executive, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Research in Organizational Change and Development, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Strategic Management Journal. His research focuses on time, and his chapter, "Time and organizational culture" is forthcoming in the Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate to be published by Sage in 2000. He is currently working on a book, The Human Organization of Time. E-mail: bluedorna@missouri.edu

Welcome to some very special issues of the Journal of Managerial Psychology (all of Issues 3/4 and part of Issues 5/6). These issues focus on polychronicity, the extent to which people prefer to be engaged in two or more tasks or events at the same time. Prior to these special issues, the published research on polychronicity could almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. This work includes Hall’s discussion of the topic (e.g. Hall, 1959, 1983; Hall and Hall, 1990), anthropologist Edward Hall being the first social scientist to note the polychronicity phenomenon and to develop a rich conceptualization and description of it. Indeed, he maintains a serious interest in the topic, with his most current published views presented in the interview I conducted with him recently (Bluedorn, 1998).

But genuine empirical work on polychronicity beyond Hall’s has been rare – until now. Perhaps the earliest such work was a promising piece by Haase et al. (1979) that, unfortunately, failed to stimulate additional work on the topic. Although Barley (1988) did not set out to study polychronicity, he used the concept to interpret his findings about cultures in hospital departments. Enter Kaufman et al. (1991), whose work directly begat Bluedorn et al. (1992) and indirectly stimulated two of the articles in these special issues (Bluedorn et al.; Kaufman-Scarborough and Lindquist). In addition, Usunier (1991) studied polychronicity cross-culturally, as did Prime and Bluedorn (1993) and Tinsley (1988); and Slocombe and Bluedorn (1999) examined the effects on individuals of individual-organizational polychronicity value congruence. Although it is possible that I have missed something, in terms of genuine original empirical research about polychronicity, that seems to be just about it unless we count researchers who basically studied polychronicity but did not use the term (e.g. Eisenhardt, 1989; McCollum and Sherman, 1991). Even so, the 11 articles in these special issues effectively increase our empirical knowledge about polychronicity by a factor of two, maybe three.

Not that the reader will find these articles to be a repetitive refrain on a single theme. The authors’ diversity alone should be proof against that as they include scholars from management, marketing, and psychology departments in Canada, France, the USA and New Zealand. A brief overview of the 11 articles will provide a further sense of this diversity.

The 11 articles present diversity along several dimensions, including level of analysis, methodology, and research questions addressed. In terms of the level of analysis, one article addresses polychronicity as part of national cultures (Cotte and Ratneshwar); two articles address polychronicity as an important attribute of organizational culture (Bluedorn et al. and Onken); one article examines polychronicity at the interface between individuals and work groups (Waller et al.); two articles address polychronicity at the individual-organization interface (Benabou; Persing); and five articles examine polychronicity at the individual level (Conte et al.; Frei et al.; Kaufman-Scarborough and Lindquist; Palmer and Schoorman; Slocombe). Methodologically, nine of the articles are empirical; two, theoretical. Among the nine empirical articles methods range from phenomenologically based interviews (Cotte and Ratneshwar) to exhaustive psychometric scale development (Bluedorn et al.), from survey methodology with top executives (Onken) to basic questionnaire methods and statistical techniques (Benabou; Bluedorn et al.; Conte et al.; Frei et al.; Kaufman-Scarborough and Lindquist; Palmer and Schoorman) and structured observation and coding of work group behavior (Waller et al.). Indeed, of the articles employing questionnaire-based methods, one reports the development of the Inventory of Polychronic Values (Bluedorn et al.) and three others use variations of this instrument (Conte et al.; Onken; Palmer and Schoorman), which itself is based on the Polychronic Attitude Index (Kaufman et al., 1991), a version of which was used by Kaufman-Scarborough and Lindquist. Thus these five articles share a common psychometric heritage, a heritage nicely balanced by the diverse approaches to measuring polychronicity used in the other five empirical articles.

Finally, the 11 articles address a wide variety of substantive issues, and by that greatly extend our knowledge of polychronicity’s impacts on human lives. Three articles (Cotte and Ratneshwar; Frei et al.; Kaufman-Scarborough and Lindquist) examine polychronicity’s impact on individual human performance and time management behaviors; Waller et al. investigate polychronicity’s impact on work group performance; and Onken looks into polychronicity’s impact on organizational performance. Moreover, Persing develops a theoretical analysis of how both individual and organizational polychronicity can be expected to affect individual creativity. Thus six of the articles deal directly with the issue of polychronicity’s impact on individual, group, or organizational performance. The remaining five articles address a variety of questions, including:

1. 1.

   polychronicity’s relationship with punctuality and schedules-and-deadlines values at the departmental level (Bluedorn et al.), and

2. 2.

   at the individual-organizational interface level (Benabou);

3. 3.

   variability in polychronic behavior (Slocombe);

4. 4.

   variability in both polychronic behaviors and the meanings attached to such behaviors (Cotte and Ratneshwar); and

5. 5.

   most fundamentally, the meaning of polychronicity itself (Palmer and Schoorman) – a conceptual problem due to variability and ambiguity in Hall’s (e.g. Hall, 1983; Hall and Hall, 1990) many discussions of the construct.

Many more topics and findings are presented in these 11 articles, but I hope this overview provides a reasonable sampling of the subjects addressed therein. Please note that two of the 11 articles – Frei et al.’s article on monochronicity, Type A behavior, and stress; and Persing’s article on polychronicity and creativity – will be published in Issues 5/6 of this Volume, owing to a double issue’s maximum page length.

Before closing, let me say something about the process by which the articles came to appear in these special issues. After the issues were publicized, every manuscript submitted underwent a double-blind review process (mine went through a special blind-to-the-reviewers process, plus two developmental reviews, the results from all of which were then submitted to the journal’s regular editor, Yochanan Altman, for final approval of the acceptance decision). This process helped improve each manuscript, and by that, the overall quality of the special issues. These reviewers did some exceptional work, and I will now acknowledge them publicly for their superb reviewing efforts:

• •

  Bruce Barringer, University of Central FloridaShawn Carraher, Indiana State UniversityJeffrey Conte, San Diego State UniversityRobert Eder, Portland State UniversityRichard Frei, Temple UniversityCarol Kaufman-Scarborough, Rutgers UniversityMary Sue Love, University of Missouri-ColumbiaMarina Onken, Florida Gulf Coast UniversityDavid Palmer, University of Nebraska, KearneyD.Lynne Persing, Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de ToulouseThomas Slocombe, University of Central OklahomaGary Stark, University of Minnesota, DuluthDonna Vinton, University of Northern IowaMary Waller, University of Illinois.

Allen C. BluedornGuest Editor