Search results

Purpose – This research presents empirical evidence on which performance measures are perceived as short-term oriented and long-term oriented by company executives, and on whether any perceived performance measure-related time orientation affects the time orientation of these executives. In addition, the study explores which measures impact executive time orientation, regardless of how these measures are perceived.

Methodology/approach – A survey was used to collect the perceptions of chief financial officers (CFOs) in 109 companies listed in the Nasdaq OMX, the Nordic Stock Exchange. Performance measures include: stock price, earnings, returns, cash flow, success of development programs, EVA™, sales, and balanced scorecard, and the method employed was multiple regression.

Findings – First, the CFOs perceived returns, sales, EPS, and stock price to have long time orientation. Second, the use of returns, stock price, and success of development programs as major performance measures encourage the CFOs toward long-term behavior, whereas the use of cash flow encourages short-term behavior. Third, stock price, earnings, and EPS are measures whose perceived time orientation affects the time orientation of executives. It is most likely due to this influence, that they have received major attention in public debates on the short time orientation of executives at the expense of other, more “silent” measures that also impact executive time orientation. Contextual factors strongly affect the results.

Practical implications – The study assists in designing executive performance measurement systems that encourage desired time orientation.

Originality/value – This study contributes to the fields of performance measurement and time orientation by recognizing the multidimensionality of the construct of time orientation and by showing how performance measures and their perceived time orientation influence executive time orientation.

The purpose of the current study is to examine how employees from different cultures respond to participative budgeting when the budget planning horizon is congruent or incongruent with their cultural time orientation. We conducted a 2×2 quasi-experiment in which cultural time orientation (short term or long term) was measured and budget planning horizon (short term or long term) was manipulated. A total of 164 employees participated in the experiment – 87 from China and 77 from the United States, representing long-term and short-term cultural time orientations, respectively. The results indicate that satisfaction with participative budgeting was greater when cultural time orientation and budget planning horizon were congruent, relative to incongruent. Also, the differential reaction between congruence and incongruence was less extreme for the Chinese participants than the U.S. participants, which is consistent with Confucian thought of “The Doctrine of the Mean.” The results of this study contribute to participative budgeting literature and suggest that managers who operate in different countries should be cognizant of cultural differences when employing participative budgeting processes.

We argue that our understanding of how institutions matter has been undermined by a piecemeal approach to temporality in institutional analyses. This paper addresses this shortcoming in the literature. We bring temporality to the fore by conceptualizing practices, which constitute institutions, as understood, situated, and coordinated in time by temporal structures. We elaborate an integrated framework of temporal structures that consist of three types: temporal patterns, temporal conceptions, and temporal orientations – and outline how each type contributes to the reproduction of practices. We discuss the implications of this framework for sustainability initiatives and conclude by suggesting future avenues of research on the temporal foundations of institutions.

Achieving temporal synchronization may require that work groups develop shared cognitions about the time-related demands they face. We investigated the extent to which group members developed shared cognitions with respect to the three temporal perceptions: time orientation (present vs. future), time compression, and time management (scheduling and time management). We argue that group members are more likely to align their perceptions to temporal characteristics of the group or organizational context (e.g. time compression, scheduling, proper time allocation) rather than to each other’s individual time orientations. Survey data collected from 104 work groups are largely consistent with these expectations. The implications of shared cognitions on time for work group functioning and performance are discussed.

Barriers to cultural adaptability include perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative biases. Differences in culturally based perceptual patterns can be problematic given that interpretation and evaluation of behavior is a critical element of teamwork. Altogether, perceptual patterns are “selective, learned, culturally determined, consistent, and inaccurate” (Adler, 1986, p. 54). Selective exposure, selective attention, and selective retention are all hallmarks of the process of perception. Bagby (1970) demonstrated how perceptual patterns become selective even in childhood. He had American and Mexican children watch a bullfight and a baseball game simultaneously using a tachistoscope. When asked what they had seen, the American children claimed to have watched a baseball game, and the Mexican children claimed to have watched a bullfight. Neither group was aware that they had been presented two stimuli simultaneously. Both groups of children selected stimuli that had meaning for their culture and ignored or forgot the stimuli that had no meaning for them. The children's culture predisposed them to notice some things and not others. Perceptual selectivity is a key barrier to cultural adaptability and influences both interpretation and evaluation.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

How does environmental uncertainty affect the process of starting new hybrid organizations? Our comparative analysis of the formation of two “green” banks – with hybrid goals linked to banking and environmental logics – reveals that shifts in their strategic orientations resulted from attempts to align uncertain and changing resource environments with the composition and goals of the organizations’ top leadership. While the initial idea and goals of the founders were similar, the organizations they established ended up with divergent strategic orientations and senior leadership groups.

The purpose of this chapter is to extend research and theory on learning and performance orientations to multiple levels of analysis. We begin by introducing a model describing the impact of individual learning and performance orientations on attentional focus, response to failure, experimentation, and motivation, and identify potential sources of these orientations. We then describe how learning and performance orientations are linked to incremental and profound change, and theoretically based propositions are presented to guide future research efforts. Leadership, organizational learning, and strategic human resource management are discussed in relation to the model, and implications of the framework for future research and practice are revealed.