The consequences of (not) seeing eye‐to‐eye about the past: The role of supervisor–team fit in past temporal focus for supervisors' leadership behavior

• Date: 01 March 2020
• Author: Frank Walter,Roman Briker,Michael S. Cole
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2416
• Published date: 01 March 2020

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

The consequences of (not) seeing eye-to-eye about the past:

The role of supervisor–team fit in past temporal focus for

supervisors' leadership behavior

Roman Briker

1

| Frank Walter

1

| Michael S. Cole

2

1

Department of Organization and Human

Resource Management, Justus-Liebig-

University Giessen, Giessen, Germany

2

Department of Management and Leadership,

Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian

University, Fort Worth, Texas

Correspondence

Roman Briker, Department of Organization

and Human Resource Management, Justus-

Liebig-University Giessen, Licher Strasse

62, 35394 Giessen, Germany.

Email: roman.briker@wirtschaft.uni-giessen.de

Funding information

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Grant/

Award Number: 392382642

Summary

This study seeks to advance our understanding of the leadership consequences that

may ensue when supervisors and their teams have similar versus differing orienta-

tions toward the past. Integrating a leader–team fit perspective with functional lead-

ership theory, we cast incongruence between supervisor and team past temporal

focus as a key antecedent of supervisors' active (i.e., task-oriented and relationship-

oriented) and passive (i.e., laissez-faire) leadership behaviors toward the team. We

tested our hypotheses in a team-level study that included a field sample of 84 super-

visors and their teams using polynomial regression and response surface analyses.

Results illustrated that supervisors demonstrated more task-oriented and

relationship-oriented leadership when supervisors' and their team's past temporal

focus were incongruent rather than aligned. Furthermore, in situations of supervisor–

team congruence, supervisors engaged in less task-oriented and relationship-

oriented leadership and more laissez-faire leadership with higher (rather than lower)

levels of supervisor and team past temporal focus. In sum, these findings support a

complex (mis)fit model such that supervisors' attention to the past may hinder their

productive leadership behaviors in some team contexts but not in others. Hence, this

research advances a novel, multiple-stakeholder perspective on the role of both

supervisors' and their team's past temporal focus for important leadership behaviors.

KEYWORDS

laissez-faire leadership, past temporal focus, relationship-oriented leadership, task-oriented

leadership, time perspective

1|INTRODUCTION

Scholars have become increasingly interested in individuals' attention

to specific time frames (i.e., the past, present, or future) and how such

temporal foci may help us to better understand important organiza-

tional behavior phenomena (Mohammed & Harrison, 2013; Shipp &

Fried, 2014). Individuals' past temporal focus (i.e., “the attention indi-

viduals devote to thinking about the past;”Shipp, Edwards, &

Lambert, 2009, p. 1), in particular, has been shown to distinctly shape

their experiences and behaviors at work (e.g., Cojuharenco, Patient, &

Bashshur, 2011; Zacher, 2016). For example, individuals characterized

by a strong past temporal focus feel less powerful (Shipp et al., 2009),

tend to delay actions and decisions (Díaz-Morales, Ferrari, & Cohen,

2008), and exhibit reduced energy and efficiency at work (Goldrich,

1967). Extrapolating these findings to leadership contexts, we antici-

pate that a supervisor's past temporal focus may critically shape his or

Received: 15 April 2018 Revised: 23 August 2019 Accepted: 3 September 2019

DOI: 10.1002/job.2416

© 2019 The Authors. Journal of Organizational Behavior published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided

the original work is properly cited.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job J Organ Behav. 2020;41:244–262.

244

her leadership behaviors. Scholars have generally assumed, in this

regard, that past-focused supervisors are more likely to demonstrate

an ineffective, passive approach toward leading others and to

minimize their purposeful leadership efforts (Bluedorn, 2002). For

example, researchers have argued that “no leader wants to be called

past-oriented”(Thoms, 2004, p. 103) because a strong orientation

toward the past evokes perceptions of a “counter-ideal manager”

(Alipour, Mohammed, & Martinez, 2017, p. 313) who dwells on mem-

ories instead of meeting current leadership responsibilities (see also

Hernández, 2017; Weick, 1979).

Interestingly, however, existing research offers little evidence to

validate these widely shared notions. Whereas scholars have fre-

quently examined supervisors' present and/or future temporal focus

(e.g., West & Meyer, 1997; Zhang, Wang, & Pearce, 2014), the empiri-

cal research has largely ignored possible connections between super-

visors' past temporal focus and their leadership behaviors. In fact, we

are aware of only one empirical study that has investigated the role of

past temporal focus in a leadership context (i.e., Nadkarni & Chen,

2014), linking a CEO's past temporal focus with his or her company's

new product introductions. Hence, our understanding of the leader-

ship implications associated with supervisors' past temporal focus is

fragmented and incomplete, despite common concerns about poten-

tial drawbacks for supervisors' leadership behaviors.

Importantly, theory and research on leader–team fit (Carter &

Mossholder, 2015; Cole, Carter, & Zhang, 2013) suggest that the

linkage betweena supervisor's past temporal focusand his or her lead-

ership behaviormay be more intricate than often assumed. This leader–

team fit perspective submits that supervisor–team interactions are not

only driven by the respective supervisor's own traits, preferences, and

goals, but also by the extent to which such supervisory characteristics

are (mis)alignedwith the respective characteristics within a supervisor's

team of subordinates (see also Gibson,Cooper, & Conger, 2009). In this

regard, this streamof research acknowledgesthat the team as a whole

(rather than individual subordinates) represents a key reference point

for supervisors' (mis)fit judgments (Bashshur, Hernández, & González-

Romá, 2011; Coleet al., 2013). This is because one'steam constitutes a

highly salient and central part of a supervisor's social context at work

such that supervisors often perceive the team as a collective entityand,

thus, tend to direct their influence behaviors toward the team in its

entirety(Hu & Judge, 2017; Oc, 2018).

In fact, research has repeatedly emphasized that incongruence

between a focal individual's and his or her work team's temporal focus

can trigger strong behavioral reactions and influence important work

outcomes (Eldor et al., 2017; Shipp et al., 2009) because such fit

(or misfit) may distinctly color a focal individual's perceptions of the

team (Gibson, Waller, Carpenter, & Conte, 2007; Mohammed &

Nadkarni, 2011). This reasoning is based on the notion that an individ-

ual's temporal focus manifests in tangible actions that are readily

observable by others, with individuals generally preferring similarity

(rather than dissimilarity) between their own and others' orientations

toward time (Mohammed & Harrison, 2013; Waller, Conte, Gibson, &

Carpenter, 2001). Consequently, scholars have suggested that (mis)fit

between supervisors' and their subordinates' time-based personality

characteristics may shape supervisors' conclusions about the ade-

quacy of subordinates' efforts and outcomes (Alipour et al., 2017).

Specifically, we argue that supervisors may perceive incongruence

between their own and their team's past temporal focus as a salient

signal of task-related and/or social problems in the team, whereas

congruence may signal that the team is functioning in line with super-

visory preferences.

On this basis, the central proposition of this research is that the

degree of incongruence between a supervisor's pasttemporal focus and

the past temporalfocus prevalent in his orher team of subordinates will

affect how the supervisor leads his or her team. To specify the nature

of this relationship, we enrich our focuson leader–team fit with insights

from functionalleadership theory (Hackman& Walton, 1986; McGrath,

1962). According to functional leadership theory, supervisors are more

likely to engage in active leadership behavior when their team fails to

exhibit attitudes and behaviors that supervisors consider critical for

team functioning (see, e.g., Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam,2010). In these

situations, functional leadership theory argues that supervisors will

respond flexibly to performance or interaction problems they perceive

in their team,in an effort “to do, or get done, whatever is not beingade-

quately handled for group needs”(McGrath, 1962, p. 5). Alternatively,

when supervisors perceive their teams as functioning appropriately,

they are less likely to intervene in team processes and, thus, they may

adopt a more “hands-off”(i.e., passive)leadership style toward theteam

(Zaccaro,Rittman, & Marks, 2001).

Integrating key ideas from leader–team fit research (Cole et al.,

2013) and functional leadershiptheory (Zaccaro et al., 2001), we there-

fore infer that a supervisormay view his or her team's ability to address

relevant task and social issues in a distinctly negativelight when super-

visor and team past temporal focus are incongruent, whereas a super-

visor's respective perceptions of the team may be more favorable in

situations of congruence—with tangibleconsequences for the supervi-

sor's specific (active and passive) leadership behaviors, as directed

toward the team as a whole. Hence, as depicted in Figure 1, our key

research question is how incongruence in pasttemporal focus between

a supervisor and his or her team relates with the supervisor's

task-oriented and relationship-oriented leadership (i.e., behaviors

aimed at proactively promoting task execution and employee well-

being, respectively; DeRue, Nahrgang, Wellmann, & Humphrey, 2011)

and with his or her laissez-faire leadership (i.e., behaviors aimed at

averting leadershipresponsibilities; Hinkin & Schriesheim, 2008).

1

By empirically examining this question, the present study

responds to repeated calls for new insights into the leadership impli-

cations of individuals' temporal focus (Alipour et al., 2017; Thoms &

Greenberger, 1995), moving beyond the examination of supervisors'

1

We conceptualizepast temporal focus incongruencebetween a supervisor and his or her team

in terms of objective (mis)fit—that is, supervisors' and their team's past temporal focus exist

independently of one another (Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman, & Johnson, 2005). Moreover,we

note that task-oriented and relationship-oriented behaviors represent prototypically active

leadership styles (Fleishman,1973), whereas laissez-faire behavior representsa prototypically

passive type of leadership (Skogstad, Einarsen, Torsheim,Aaslang, & Hetland, 2007). A large

volumeof research attests to the relevance of theseleadership behaviors for key organizational

outcomes(e.g., supervisor and team performanceas well as team members' job satisfaction and

motivation;Judge et al., 2004; Judge & Piccolo, 2004).

BRIKER ET AL.245