Managers, strategic choice and time: A study of the influence of time orientation upon strategic choice by managers

The ability to reduce uncertainty by describing, explaining and predicting human behavior has been a goal of mankind for millennia. Over the past 100 years culture value theory has been developed through the efforts of social scientists across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology and comparative management as one step in the effort toward reaching that goal.; Because culture involves social behavior, it is concerned with group influences as opposed to biological inheritance or individual idiosyncratic variations. One approach to operationalizing culture value theory has been to use values as dimensions that allow us to distinguish groups from one another. More narrowly, work-related cultural values have been of interest because of the practical implications of understanding human behavior in a work or business context.; This paper describes research that extends the application of work-related culture value theory to the critical domain of strategic choice by managers. Specifically, this exploratory study of 104 business owners/managers from the U.S., Brazil and Japan tests the relationship between the national cultural work-related value of time orientation and the choice of strategic type by managers across national cultures. Time orientation (independent variable) is measured using the Circles Test of Cottle (1967) and strategy choice (dependent variable) is measured using the miles and Snow (1978) typology.; The goal of the study was to increase the understanding of how managers make strategic choices. Because of the economic, social and political effects of strategy choices, this knowledge is potentially valuable to stakeholders including employees, suppliers, shareholders, and governments as well as social scientists.; The study results are consistent with the theoretical interpretations of causality direction. Time orientation is significantly correlated with strategic choice in the business sample. Canonical Analysis supports the proposition that time orientation significantly influences strategy choice. Although results indicate one can increase the ability to predict strategy choice by 14 percent compared to random selection by knowing time orientation, this is cross-sectional research so there are the usual problems in extrapolating from a cross-sectional model to a really predictive model. In addition, possible non-response bias, the limited size and scope of the sample and limitation of the research to one industry restricts the ability to generalize from the research. More research is needed using larger samples, in more than one industry, across a greater number of national cultures to sharpen the insights with respect to strategic choice.