Taming time: How inclusive leadership mitigates temporal conflict and time stress in IT projects

• Team temporal conflict negatively predicts IT project professional’s work performance. • Time stress mediates the relationship between team temporal conflict and IT project professional’s work performance. • Project manager’s inclusive leadership reduces the effect of team temporal conflict on IT project professional’s work performance via time stress. This study adopts the Job Demands-Resources model to propose team temporal conflict as a job demand that directly impacts IT project professional’s work performance and indirectly through time stress. Additionally, it presents the project manager’s inclusive leadership as a team-level job resource that moderates the impact of team temporal conflict on IT project professional’s work performance through time-related stress. Data were collected from 369 IT professionals nested in 65 App development projects in Pakistan’s Information Technology sector. Constructs’ factor structure and validity were confirmed using confirmatory factor analysis. The multi-level mediation and moderated-mediation hypotheses were tested using robust multi-level modeling via Mplus. Results showed that team temporal conflict negatively impacts IT project professional’s work performance, and this relationship is mediated by time stress. The negative impact of team temporal conflict on work performance through time stress was reduced when project managers exhibited a highly inclusive leadership style. This study advances existing literature by examining the role of team temporal conflict as a job demand and team-level stressor in IT project settings, which often face high failure rates due to time and temporal challenges. Furthermore, the study enhances the literature by proposing inclusive leadership as a job resource that can mitigate the negative impacts of team temporal conflict on IT project professional’s performance.