Granting Time: How Individuals Manage Temporal Multiplicity

While previous research has extensively examined the temporal structuring of organizations, little research has explored how individuals manage temporal multiplicity from operating through multiple temporal structures. Based on a study of college professors holding large, long-term grants, this paper suggests that professors manage their temporal multiplicity through the temporal strategies of transcending, reshaping, entraining, and bridging. Professors’ use of these strategies is conditioned on their positions in their organizations, grants, and careers. Changes in these positions, along with temporal reflexivity resulting from the insufficiency of using single strategies, trigger professors’ shifts among the strategies. Professors’ use of these strategies leads them to two overall patterns of managing temporal multiplicity: either developing asynchrony or synchrony with their organizations. The findings are theoretically important because they demonstrate the dynamics, conditions, and implications of individuals’ temporal strategies, which also explains why accepting the temporality that grants offer is complicated.