Leadership Needs Time: The Roles of Subjective and Objective Time for Leadership Processes and Outcomes

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Frank Walter
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392382642

The leadership literature has often neglected issues of time, proceeding as though leadership processes unfold in a non-temporal, static fashion. Scholars have identified this neglect as unfortunate because a temporal perspective could enhance leadership theory and practice. Hence, this proposal responds to the repeated calls for a stronger temporal perspective in leadership research. By developing and testing new theory on the role of both objective and subjective time for key leadership phenomena, we strive for a better understanding of (a) why leaders exhibit specific behaviors, (b) how such behaviors shape followers' reactions, and (c) how the timing of specific influence attempts determines their outcomes. As such, our research aims to create more viable leadership theories and offer practical recommendations for effective leadership in organizations. The project is structured along three phases. Phase 1 focuses on the role of leaders' subjective time orientations for their leadership styles. This phase conceptualizes subjective time as a multi-faceted phenomenon that comprehensively shapes leaders' behavior and, thus, lays an important fundament for their success or failure. Phase 2 moves beyond this leader-centered approach to integrate followers' time orientations, highlighting followers' subjective time as a key contingency factor for effective leadership. Finally, Phase 3 turns toward informal leadership contexts, examining how objective and subjective time combine to enable an individual's leader emergence in a team of peers. This phase aims to illustrate that successful leadership not only depends on what (informal) leaders do, but also on when they exhibit the respective behaviors. Taken together, the proposed research strives to advance the leadership literature by assigning a central role to time in both theory development and empirical testing. In doing so, our key goal is to contribute to the evolution of leadership research by creating new knowledge on the pivotal role of time for leadership processes and outcomes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: China (Hong Kong), USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Michael Cole, Ph.D.; Professorin Catherine Lam, Ph.D.
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Monika Schuhmacher