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Digitally oriented firms are faced with new opportunities and risks in today’s ever-changing world. Drawing upon organisational entrainment theory, this study investigates how supply chain (SC) entrainment improves the effects of digital orientation on firm performance through absorbing risks and exploiting opportunities.

Survey data were collected from 307 Chinese manufactures and analysed using structural equation modelling and regression analysis.

The results show digital orientation absorbs risk through evoking three SC entrainment dimensions (i.e. internal entrainment, entrainment with customers and entrainment with suppliers). Entrainment with customers and suppliers mediate the relationship between internal entrainment and firm performance. An opportunity exploitation mechanism is evidenced by the moderating effects of internal and external entrainment on the relationship between digital orientation and firm performance.

The empirical findings provide timely insights for managers to fully harness the benefits of digital orientation by using SC entrainment, i.e. to match the tempo and pace of internal and external cyclical activities to reduce the risks and increase the benefits of adopting advanced digital technologies. The authors show managers how to adjust their organization’s actions to keep tempo and synchronous phase with their SC partners.

The study introduces and conceptualizes a construct (i.e. SC entrainment) to understand how risks and opportunities arising from digital transformation can be addressed to maximize the value of advanced digital technologies.

The current study aims to investigate the temporal mechanisms in HRM systems by focusing on how HRM systems evolve over time and how such changes affect organizational innovation.

This paper draws on organizational entrainment theory to examine how pace of change in employee involvement programs (EIPs) influences innovation via data from an eight-year longitudinal survey collected by Statistics Canada. The final sample includes 15,679 workplace–year observations.

This research shows that the effects of HRM programs on performance are more than just the mean effect – the pace of change by which changes are implemented in HRM programs matters in the long run. The optimal level of change pace occurs when the EIPs are changing at a pace that entrains (or synchronizes) with organizational rhythm of strategic changes. Results suggest that change pace in EIPs has an inverted-U-shaped relationship with both pace and quality of innovation. The curvilinear effect is more pronounced for organizations with relatively lower mean level of EIPs.

First, this study captures only key measures of the EIPs and may not be generalizable to other dimensions of the HR systems. Second, the results of this paper should be interpreted at the HR program level or bundles of HR practices – the findings may not be generalizable to lower levels of analysis. Third, as a result of annual measurement, this study cannot capture short-lived minor dynamic HR misfits where workplaces quickly adjust to regain alignment. Fourth, to attain meaningful and consistent measures of strategic HR change, this study only includes surviving workplaces with at least five years of observations.

This paper provides insights to managers and business leaders on how to implement strategic changes in HRM systems effectively to attain sustained innovation outcomes in the long run. To achieve an optimal level of innovation, organizations need to consider not only what and how many EIPs should be used but also how to strategically change EIPs to meet dynamic internal and external changes.

The current research introduces organizational entrainment theory to explain and empirically test the conflicting predictions of the universalist and contingency perspectives on the effects of strategic changes in HRM.

The purpose of this study is to investigate what type of knowledge enhances the frequency of strategic renewal for organizations operating in high velocity environments. It also investigates whether strategic renewal frequency is beneficial, rather than harmful in such environments.

The study followed a two-step data collection process involving pilot interviews and an on-site survey data collection procedure. The authors first conducted face-to-face pilot interviews with 16 fashion retailers lasting 30 min to 2 h. They then tested their hypotheses by using a sample of 152 South Korean fashion retailers, as the fashion industry is a prototypical high velocity environment.

Firms that have a higher rate of strategic renewal frequency outperform those with a lower one. Moreover, the frequency of strategic renewal mitigates the ill effects of lack of legitimacy not imbued by a franchisor’s backing. Finally, firms can increase the frequency of their strategic renewal efforts by accessing knowledge from their main customers more efficiently.

The results of this study provide a refined picture of the role of knowledge acquisition efficiency and strategic renewal frequency in the pursuit of competitive advantage in high velocity environments.

To provide ways of how organizations can benefit from entrainment, the purpose of this paper is to create a better theoretically grounded understanding of entrainment in organizations by reviewing the literature, describing managerial implications and identifying future research directions.

A systematic literature review of relevant literature based on peer-reviewed research papers published in highly ranked scientific journals.

It provides a clear understanding as to what constitutes entrainment in organizations and emphasizes its complexity. Further, six benefits of entrainment are highlighted, including the positive relationship between entrainment and organizational outcomes. The review may also provide entrepreneurs and practitioners a scientific basis for developing innovative tools to help managers’ foster entrainment in organizations.

The review indicates that entrainment plays a much larger role in organizations than we think. Change leaders' actions may impact the emotions and actions of change recipients through entrainment. The selected keywords used in the search and the researcher's bias of including or excluding articles for this review are the major research limitations.

It is one of the first papers, to our knowledge, to provide a structured overview and understanding of the entrainment phenomenon in an organizational context, based on 41 peer-reviewed articles.

Entrainment is a theory of causality wherein different but proximate actants are tied to one another in complementary rhythms. Entrainment proposes a naturalism of interrelatedness. Manuel DeLanda has explored the logic of social entrainment. Opposing assumptions are found in Actor Network Theory. ANT merges the sociology of knowledge and an analysis of power into a theory of pragmatic causality. Social causality is in ANT (micro‐) politically constructed. The goal of this paper is to examine entrainment as a generative theory of social construction wherein linkages of ideas, persons, actions, events and objects, unlike in ANT's translation are not saturated by (principles of) social power. Illustrations of how entrainment and ANT hold up in practice are provided.

As part of the developing attention being paid to time in organization science, this chapter discusses two temporal dimensions – polychronicity and speed – and develops propositions relating these two temporal dimensions to other organization science variables. The propositions are specified according to levels of analysis, at least three of which are considered in propositions presented for each dimension. Two other temporal dimensions – punctuality and temporal depth – are also described, albeit not as extensively as polychronicity and speed. A fifth temporal phenomenon, entrainment, provides insights into organizational processes as well as the four temporal dimensions. The chapter concludes by outlining some reasons for caution for both theory and practice.

This chapter examines the relationship between team routines and temporal entrainment. While the process of entrainment generally reinforces the routines that teams follow temporal entrainment also creates opportunities for externally focused teams to change their routines. Entrainment creates team rhythms that include pauses in activity that can act as triggers to change. These pauses alone are not enough to impel teams to change; managers must also employ temporal design to make use of these opportunities for change. Both the rhythms of temporal entrainment and the pauses that accompany them are part of a team’s task environment. By uncovering key rhythms, as well as by managing the pauses, managers can both reinforce desired routines and change problematic ones.

Assessing the antecedents of innovation implementation holds importance for companies, as previous studies have shown that without proper implementation the innovation is doomed to fail. Over the past few years, research on innovation implementation is growing. However, the evidence on the antecedents of innovation implementation is inconsistent. The purpose of the study is to conduct a review of the literature using meta-analysis to summarize the divergent views present in the literature.

A meta-analysis technique is adopted for reviewing the literature. The literature search was conducted with selected keywords in different databases and top journals from the ABDC list (A* and A).

The results of the meta-analysis that summarize evidence from 42 papers, 100 effect sizes and 32,223 organizations show the significance and homogeneous/heterogeneous opinions of the past studies. Results reveal the homogeneity in antecedents such as transformational leadership, business collaboration, employee competency, leader competency, absorptive capacity and business size and heterogeneity in the antecedents such as communication, customer collaboration, internal entrainment, external entrainment, implementation climate and strategic resources.

The results imply that managers attempting to implement innovation in the organizations need to first focus on homogenous antecedents followed by heterogeneous antecedents for successful implementation.

This study advocates research on innovation implementation. It tests the significance, nature of the relationship and summarizes the divergent views on antecedents of innovation implementation in an organization. The results of this study can also be used in the theoretical advancement of management innovation literature.

Our study examined whether work engagement follows a predictable pattern over the course of the work week and the role of personality traits in shaping this pattern.

We examined these questions with 131 employees from Canada and the United States who provided daily ratings of work engagement over the course of 10 work days.

Multilevel modeling revealed that employee engagement followed an inverted U-shaped curvilinear pattern from Monday to Friday, peaking midweek. Neuroticism moderated the change pattern of engagement across the work week, such that individuals with higher levels of neuroticism experienced lower and less stable levels of work engagement throughout the work week compared with individuals with lower levels of neuroticism. However, extroversion and conscientiousness did not moderate the change pattern of employee engagement.

These results provide insight into the entrainment of work to the work week and how this entrainment is further affected by the personality trait neuroticism.

Understanding the weekly pattern of work engagement will help leaders’ time work assignments, interventions, and training sessions to keep the levels of employee engagement high.

Our study revealed novel predictors of within-person engagement: weekly entrainment and neuroticism.

The centrality of time to the quality and experience of our lives has led scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider its social origins, including temporal differences among social collectives. Consistent across their accounts is the acknowledgment that time is co-constructed by people via their communicative interactions and formalized through the use of symbols. The goal of this chapter is to build on these extant socio-historical accounts – which explain temporal commodification, construction, and compression in Western, industrialized organizations – to offer a perspective that is grounded in communication and premised on human agency. Specifically, it takes a chronemic approach to interrogating time in the workplace, exploring how time is a symbolic construction emergent through human interaction. It examines McGrath and Kelly's (1986) model of social entrainment as relevant to the interactional bases of time, and utilizes it and structuration theory to consider the mediation and interpenetration of four oft-cited practices in the emergence of a Westernized time orientation: industrial capitalism, the Protestant work ethic, the mechanized clock, and standardized time zones. Surrounded by contemporary workplace discussions on managing the demands of personal–professional times, this analysis employs themes of temporal commodification, construction, and compression to explore the influence of these socio-historical developments in shaping norms about the time and timing of work.