| Polychronicity in Managing Multiple Goals: The Effect of Control Formalization and Control Flexibility |
Received:October 13, 2017 Revised:October 13, 2017 |
Key Words: multiple goals; organizational control; organizational performance |
| Author Name | Affiliation | | Feifei Yang* | East China Normal University | | George Shinkle | University of New South Wales | | Hang Zhao | University of New South Wales | | Lingli Luo | University of New South Wales |
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Abstract: |
| We investigate the relationship between organizational control, specifically control formalization and flexibility, and the propensity for organizations to have multiple goals. We extend the traditional sequential attention logic from behavioural theory by drawing insights from the literature on polychronicity – defined as the extent to which organizations focus attention on multiple goals simultaneously. We build our arguments on attentional efficiency logic including directional efficiency for control formalization and adaptive efficiency for control flexibility and the countervailing mental models that organizational controls shape. In a multi-country sample of 555 organizations, we find moderation effects of control flexibility on the curvilinear (inverted-U) relationship between control formalization and polychronicity in managing multiple goals. Our research opens new avenues of theorizing multiple goals and builds theoretical link between multiple goals and organizational control. |
