How leaders respond to team time urgency diversity: A functional leadership perspective.

Prior research on team time urgency diversity (TUD) has positioned team temporal leadership as a moderator of the relationship between TUD and team outcomes, suggesting that team temporal leadership may buffer TUD's risks or unlock its benefits. This perspective assumes that leaders naturally respond to TUD, yet it offers little insight into whether, why, and when they choose to do so. Drawing on functional leadership theory, we propose that TUD acts as a contextual trigger that may elicit team temporal leadership by generating unmet temporal needs, thereby motivating leaders to intervene. We further argue that leaders' own time urgency shapes these responses, such that the positive relationship between TUD and leaders' motivation to improve temporal functioning is stronger among leaders with higher time urgency, thereby leading to greater team temporal leadership. Results from a multiwave, multisource field study and two experiments consistently supported our proposed model. Together, our findings offer a more nuanced account of how leaders respond to temporal diversity and extend the broader diversity literature by reframing diversity as a trigger for leader actions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).