Introduction to the Handbook on the Temporal Dynamics of Organizational Behavior

Abstract

The editorial boards of leading organizational behavior journals have launched several calls for more dynamic research. The reason is that there is a growing awareness that most phenomena in organizational behavior are inherently temporal, and that it is important to study how these phenomena and their relationships evolve and change over time, how employees react to these changes, and how trajectories develop over time. Despite the obvious role of time, it bears little empirical acknowledgment in the organizational behavior literature. As a result, we know and understand little about the factors related to the emergence or decline of the phenomena under study, their stability or dynamism, the sequence of their occurrence, or their rate of change. This presents a major barrier to advancing the organizational behavior literature because the role of time is essential to fully comprehend the processes underlying the development and impact of emotions, attitudes, and behaviors in the workplace. This volume includes chapters written by leading scholars whose work shifts focus from a differential to a temporal and process-oriented lens to enhance understanding of how things happen (e.g., interrelationships among temporal aspects of phenomena), as well as why things happen (e.g., exploring determinants of these temporal aspects). In light of the aforementioned limitations in the broad field of organizational behavior, the objective of this particular volume is to challenge and refine the way scholars think about organizational behavior and offer the conceptual, statistical, and methodological tools needed to move the field of organizational behavior forward.