MULTIPLE GOALS IN ORGANIZATIONS: THE ROLE OF TEMPORAL DIMENSIONS

A canonical insight in strategic management is that many organizations face multiple goals. Previous empirical and theoretical work has primarily focused on understanding the effect of multiple goals on organizations, including how they can be effectively managed. In this article, we encourage a shift of attention away from possible solutions and instead toward zeroing in on the underpinning problem. The core premise of this article is that multiple goals are characterized by unique temporal dimensions: duration, tempo, acceleration, and timing. We maintain that misalignment between these temporal dimensions creates tensions in pursuing them, rather than the goals per se. We suggest how synchronicity (alignment) or asynchronicity (misalignment) of duration, tempo, acceleration, and timing across two goals affects an organization’s ability to perform and balance multiple goals. This article presents an innovative perspective that promises to advance our understanding of the phenomenon of multiple goals in organizations by focusing on the precise sources of the varying difficulty in managing multiple goals and helps explain under what conditions organizations are likely to fail to deal with them. This perspective opens up important frontiers regarding theoretical and empirical advancements in research on multiple goals.