The great temporal divide: top management team temporal faultlines and dominant subgroups shape firm innovativeness in Iran

While executives vary in attention to the past, present, and future, prior work has largely examined these temporal orientations in isolation or at the individual level, which limits insight into how they jointly configure within top management teams (TMTs) and translate into firm behaviors. In this study, we advance a configurational perspective by introducing TMT temporal faultlines, defined as subgroup divisions based on the alignment of members’ past, present, and future foci. We distinguish two key features of temporal faultlines: temporal faultline strength and the dominant subgroup temporal profile, and propose these configurational properties shape the emergence of TMT time-awareness norms through regulating how teams attend to and coordinate temporal demands. Based on multi-wave survey data from 209 TMTs of small-and medium-sized enterprises in Iran, our findings suggest that temporal faultlines, making temporal differences salient, foster the development of shared norms around time management. We further find that TMT time-awareness norms exhibit an inverted U-shaped relationship with firm innovativeness, with moderate levels enhancing innovativeness by balancing temporal discipline and flexibility. Together, these findings shift research on executive temporality from individual traits to team configurations, and extend faultlines theory by showing that both subgroup differentiation and subgroup content matter.