Time speaks operational efficiency: Future-Time-Reference approach

초록

How organizations view "time" shapes how they coordinate and utilize operational resources. This study examines how proactive temporal framing, treating future contingencies as requiring present preparation and coordination, is associated with more efficient operational resource utilization. This study uses linguistic futuretime reference (FTR) as a language-based proxy for this framing: weak-FTR languages express future events in present-tense forms, making the future feel psychologically closer. Using global airline data from 1994 to 2012, this study finds that airlines in weak-FTR contexts show higher efficiency in resource utilization. This association is stronger when more codeshare partners also come from weak-FTR contexts, although the moderation evidence is context-dependent. The study reframes the trade-off between future orientation and efficiency around operations and identifies temporal alignment as a boundary condition under temporal complexity.

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