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Allen C. Bluedorn: University of Missouri-Columbia, USA
Thomas J. Kalliath: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Michael J Strube: Washington University, St Louis, USA, and
Gregg D. Martin: Columbia College, Columbia, Missouri, USA
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Vancouver, BC, Canada, August 6-9, 1995. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers, Shawn Carraher, Natalie Cleeton, Robert Eder, Mary Sue Love-Stuart, David Palmer, Marsha Richins, George Tanner, and Daniel Turban for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript; Jon Krosnick, for his advice about testing for reverse scoring effects; and Chester Schriesheim, for guidance concerning his quantitative procedure for assessing content validity. The authors also wish to thank Guy Adams, Bruce Barringer, Debra Cartwright, Ronda Callister, William Donoher, Daniel Greening, Melody LaPreze, Granger Macy, Mary Beth Marrs, and Sheila Watson for allowing us access to their classes to gather data; William Donoher, for his assistance with data collection; and Jared Wilmes, for his editorial assistance. Support for this research was provided by a Research Board grant from the University of Missouri System, by a Research Council grant from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and by Summer Research Fellowships from the College of Business and Public Administration at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Over the past decade and a half, questions about organizational culture's impacts on many aspects of organization-level (e.g. Kotter and Heskett, 1992; Peters and Waterman, 1982) and individual-level (e.g. O'Reilly et al., 1991; Sheridan, 1992) behaviors have been prominent organizational research topics. However, with the exception of an occasional reference to long-term versus short-term time horizons (e.g. Das, 1986; Ouchi, 1981), little of the organiza-tional culture research has addressed what may be some of the most fundamental dimensions of any culture, the temporal dimensions. A few theorists (Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988; McGrath and Rotchford, 1983; Schein, 1992) have discussed the temporal attributes of organizations and their cultures, but little empirical research - Schriber and Gutek's (1987) scale-development work being a notable exception - conducted within actual organizations has addressed the temporal dimensions. Even Schriber and Gutek's (1987) comprehensive temporal scale-development work did not include a scale for what may be the most basic temporal dimension of all, polychronicity, which concerns how many...