The More Urgency, the Better? The Impact of Top Leaders’ Time Urgency on Strategic Entrepreneurship

This study aimed to research the impact of top leaders’ time urgency, as a temporal dispositional trait, on strategic entrepreneurship. It also studied the moderating effects of firm growth and the expectation gap on the above relationship. The study tests these hypotheses using matched data from the “letters to shareholders” (LTS) and “Management Discussion and Analysis” (MD&A) of 167 cases involving 81 companies across 31 industries in China from 2008 to 2020. After executing Heckman’s two-stage regression, the results show that top leaders’ time urgency fosters strategic entrepreneurship by balancing exploration versus exploitation. Furthermore, the main effect turns positive with sustained firm growth and negative with a higher expectation gap. This study contributes to the literature on the antecedents of strategic entrepreneurship from the temporal trait perspective. It provides insights into the micro-foundations of strategic entrepreneurship from organization-level factors. The findings offer innovative avenues for implementing strategic entrepreneurship in local Chinese firms and pave the way for examining the relationships between temporal traits and competitive dynamics in the future.