Immigrant Workers’ Organizational Temporality: Association With Cultural Time Orientation, Acculturation, and Mobile Technology Use

Abstract

Based on a meso-level model of organizational temporality, this study examined U.S. immigrant workers’ workplace temporal enactment and construal regarding cultural time orientation (monochronic vs. polychronic), acculturation type (assimilation, integration, segregation), and mobile technology use. Analyses revealed that cultural time orientation and acculturation type interacted to influence separated enactment of organizational temporality, and immigrant workers’ acculturation type and mobile use for work had significant interaction effects on their future- and present-time perspective. Participants with integrated and assimilated acculturation were more likely to experience time in ways consistent with the Western, industrialized organizations’ temporality, whereas those with the segregated acculturation reported a distinct pattern of temporal enactment and construal in relation to mobile phone use for work.