Building Power to Lead Change

Why We Love Time-Travel Tales

Source: Shutterstock

By Daniel Butcher

People love stories that involve time travel, from books such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, and the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon (adapted into a TV series) and shows such as Doctor Who and Quantum Leap to comedy movies such as Groundhog Day, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Hot Tub Time Machine and action/adventure films such as the Back to the Future and Terminator series.

What’s so universally compelling about the concept?

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that the appeal of time-travel stories is that people often imagine what it would be like to travel backward and forward in time.

“We live in any given moment, but in those moments as we mentally time travel, we can remember select things, we can forecast things, and so we can create whatever story we want,” Shipp said. “When we see it in movie or show form, it fascinates us to be able to move into the future and see, ‘How did that play out?’—there’s a little bit of certainty that comes with that, so that’s one element.

“Another part of that is that we forget how things change,” she said. “For example, we assume, ‘If I am in an accident and suffer an injury and I lose the use of my legs, I would be so unhappy,’ and there’s a lot of research on this; yet we know that people have happiness set points.

“We forget the resilience that we have over time.”

Popular fantasy

“I was just thinking about this today in terms of the weather,” Shipp said. “We’re having this really weird cold snap in Texas, and so, of course, my brain is thinking, ‘Well, if this is what the weather is going to be from now on, I’m going to move someplace else.’

“But that thought assumes this experience would be the same in another 10 years, rather than be temporary or change in another way,” she said. “What do I know about what the future holds?

“Some of those time-travel films get us thinking about the elements we’ve forgotten about the past or what might be in the future, so it’s as much a fantasy as it gives us something to sink our teeth into when we think about what’s continuous versus what’s changing.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Time-Management Hacks Don’t Work for Everyone

By Daniel Butcher

When it comes to time-management tips, people respond to work schedules and deadlines differently, and what works for an early bird might not be useful for a night owl.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that time management is a common headache for many workers.

“There’s still a really big push to better manage your time, and even right now, I’m still seeing elements of post-pandemic burnout,” Shipp said. “My theory is that many people struggle with time management because leaders have never gotten down to the meaning of people’s time at work and an individual perspective of how workers are currently managing—or would prefer to manage—their time.

“Time-management hacks that are so commonly prescribed might work for some people but not for others—for some people, it might make it worse,” she said. “For example, it is widely prescribed to block your workday to work on certain things at certain times—but that overlooks how some people work better in a state of flow, working based on events, not time.

“There’s a couple of time-management issues that have been around for a long time, but we’re looking at them too simplistically, without understanding how people experience and view time individually.”

Instead, experts and influencers are touting life hacks, including time-management strategies, that resonate with a percentage of the population but might not work for everybody.

“It’s really comparable right now to the research on nutrition—they’re finding customized diets that are optimized for different metabolisms and making individual prescriptions for workouts and what to eat,” Shipp said.

“We used to think of this as ‘calories in, calories out,’ but now we realize, ‘Wow, it isn’t that simple, because you could eat the same things as me, but we have different outcomes because we have different biological makeups,’” she said

The same thing goes for individuals’ cognitive makeup and their chronological perceptions of time.

“For example, are you an early-morning person or are you a late-night person?” Shipp said. “That can affect your performance as your time management and task prioritization needs to be shared to your energy level.

“Similarly, rigid work schedules of certain hours in the office may work for some employees but not others,” she said.

“There are so many things that we don’t yet incorporate into workforce discussions that that would help us to get away from these blanket hacks and one-size-fits-all recommendations.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

The Pitfalls of Thinking about Your Jobs Instead of Your Career

By Daniel Butcher

Far too often, workers either stay too long in a job that isn’t a good fit, or, at the other extreme, hop from job to job without a coherent plan for achieving their desired career path.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that when it comes to people deciding whether their current job is a good fit or which jobs to apply for, they shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. Put another way, think of each job you apply for in the context of the career that you’d like to have over the long haul.

“Career-planning is a long-lived topic, but in many ways, people have moved away from thinking about careers and instead it’s just a string of jobs—maybe you have this job for a year and that job for a year, but none of them ties into a larger career path,” Shipp said. “One of the things that you may regret is accepting a job without thinking about your fit over time, for example.”

Over time, it’s crucial to plan for the career you want and articulate the story you’re telling yourself, the narrative of what that looks like, and whether the job you’re in or applying to fits that narrative, she said.

“If we aren’t doing long-term career planning and lose the ability to think of ourselves as the protagonist in a continuous story from past to present to future, then people can make job changes that don’t necessarily fit or work any better than where they were before,” Shipp said.

“Many companies in America seem to simply accept this job-hopping trend, recruiting constantly to overcome the short-term tenures that are now so common,” she said. “But individuals can create a better experience for themselves if they give some thought to their career narrative.

“If crafted thoughtfully, they may even find a better fit with an organization that values the same things.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Doing Meaningful Work Makes Time Fly

By Daniel Butcher

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes; when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That’s relativity.” —Albert Einstein

When people talk about time at work, they usually don’t think about subjective time, how we perceive time differently, for example, at work vs. on vacation, noted Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Annals article on that topic with Karen Jansen of Henley Business School.

“A key to understanding subjective time is thinking about how people interpret time itself—workers often ask themselves, ‘Is there meaning in what I’m doing? Where is this leading me?’” Shipp said. “Expense reports feel meaningless, and most people consider them to be a waste of time, as opposed to, ‘I worked on this big project—it’s going to save lives, for example, if you’re in the medical community.’

“So the same amount of time spent on one sort of task or project vs. another can feel different and have different meaning, and that interpretation of time is really important for how people think and feel about their job and career,” she said.

“Leaders need to consider this different view of time when engaging their teams.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Mental Time Travel at Work Matters

By Daniel Butcher

While many self-help gurus advise living in the moment, most people’s thoughts also tend to wander to the past or the future. That has implications for how people interact with each other and work together.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Annals article on that topic with Karen Jansen of North Carolina State University, said that when people talk about time at work, they’re almost always referring to “objective time.”

“Time is measured by the clock or the calendar, so when workers think, ‘What time is a meeting scheduled?’ or ‘Am I managing my time well?’ or ‘December feels different than June,’ they’re always referring back to what they think are fixed elements of time—the clock or the calendar,” Shipp said. “But my research over the years has really been looking at people’s subjective experience and interpretation of time, and when we went into the literature to really explore this more in depth, we found that this is mostly hidden.

“One of the main elements of subjective time is that people mentally time travel,” she said. “They remember the past and they forecast the future.

“At any given moment, 50% of your thoughts are spent in another period of time; you aren’t in the present moment—you’re thinking about different periods of time.”

Other research that Shipp has done shows that people have characteristic tendencies to mentally stay in one or more periods of time. Some people tend to think about the past more often, while others like to plan and imagine what will happen in the future.

“I’m very future-focused, whereas my husband is very much present- and past-focused,” Shipp said. “If you think about it from a work perspective, if people are thinking about different things, if their minds are in different places, they can have conflicts, or they can have complementarities.

“That kind of subjectivity has important implications for team composition or, the flip side of it, team conflict,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Focusing on the Past vs. the Present vs. the Future at Work

By Daniel Butcher

Are you not seeing eye-to-eye with your boss or a colleague? It may be that you focus more on the past, present, or future than they do—and this could be both good and bad.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that talking with your boss and colleagues about your temporal orientations—how often you both tend to think about the past, the present, and the future—can be illuminating and may even enable better collaboration.

“I work with somebody that, when we compare these things, they’re very much present- and past-focused, and so they’re the person that is constantly telling me, ‘You’ve come so far; look at what you’ve done—do you remember this happened five or 10 years ago?’” Shipp said. “Whereas I’m saying, ‘You need to know that my future focus is really pushing me into the future, because things are uncertain, and I haven’t done enough yet—I need to do more.’

“I’m pushing, pushing, pushing, whereas they’re saying, ‘Wait, hold on, savor this, acknowledge where you’ve been,’ and vice versa; ‘I’ve helped that person with strategic planning and things that don’t come as naturally to them,” she said.

“As individuals, we need to understand where your mind naturally tends to go and understand too how other people’s minds might look different than yours.”

Although different temporal orientations or ways of perceiving time can be helpful, Shipp noted that they can also lead to conflicts among colleagues within a team or department or between bosses and their direct reports.

“Originally, I got into arguments with the person with whom I worked, because we didn’t realize what different world views we had—we were literally opposite,” Shipp said. “He would say, ‘Why are you always thinking about this thing going forward?’ and I would say, ‘What? Why can’t you think about something that’s so important?’

“Understanding yourself, making that temporal orientation explicit for yourself and for the people that you work with—that’s when you can start to see, ‘Oh, hey, you’re focused on this other period of time’ so that I might ask you to fill in the gaps of the things that I can’t see because I’m so future-focused,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

How Focusing on the Past, Present, or Future Affects Your Career

By Daniel Butcher

Ask yourself: In any given day, how much time do you spend thinking about the past, the present, and the future? That ratio has implications for:

• your performance at work
• how well you collaborate
• how you manage time

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that she and colleagues have measured how much people think about the past, the present, and the future for various research studies.

“A new research method we developed enables us to look at not just those three different dimensions separately or the interactions among them but also at prototypes—typical combinations of past, present, and future focus,” Shipp said. “For example, people high in all three are hyper-temporal individuals, whereas people low in all three don’t think about time at all.

“There are also people that only think about the present moment—they don’t really think about where they’ve been or where they’re going,” she said. “It’s just ‘carpe diem.’

“What was neat about that method is that we could use data to show that despite all the different combinations that could result from being high or low on each of the three different dimensions, there really were just a couple of different prototypes, and they’re differentially related to outcomes.”

Shipp and colleagues found that people with a strong future focus see certain benefits, but there are also drawbacks if they ignore the past and present altogether.

“Much of the literature has looked at future focus as positive given that it helps you to plan and anticipate events. But what we found is that future focus on its own doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all good—it can make you more anxious because it can highlight uncertainty,” Shipp said.

“So although future focus can make you more successful because you plan ahead, also having a stronger present focus tends to make people a little bit happier,” she said.

Shipp also found some other unexpected findings for other dimensions of temporal focus.

“We didn’t really find that people were only past-focused, nostalgic types,” Shipp said. “However, these were limited samples, so we called for more profile research to study this in more depth.

“It really extends the findings of prior research and takes them in new directions,” she said.

In addition, Shipp said that such a profile approach is important for collaboration at work.

“When we start to look at, ‘What’s your profile versus my profile?’ as opposed to just saying, ‘We’re both high on future focus; we should have the same outcomes,’ that could help people regulate their own work schedules and productivity, and it could have implications for managers and leaders in terms of recognizing how different team members perceive time,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Work Frenemies Are More Common than Work Friends

By Daniel Butcher

In our portfolio of relationships, we want as many friends and as few enemies as possible. But many work relationships aren’t clearly positive or negative; instead, they’re more neutral, like cordial acquaintances, or even ambivalent. Think “frenemies,” two-faced colleagues, or polite rivals. While having mixed feelings about a coworker sounds awkward—and research studies have shown that frenemies increase each other’s stress and blood pressure—ambivalent relationships also tend to boost creativity, adaptability, and productivity by fueling a competitive spark.

“Ambivalent relationships have always been relatively common in organizations, as they are breeding grounds for having to simultaneously collaborate and compete, for example,” said Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter. “But because some of the more complicated interpersonal interactions were paused or transformed during the COVID-19 pandemic, workplace relationships seemed to become more one-dimensional.

“Either someone was unreliable or difficult to work with, or they were motivated and helpful,” she said. “Now, in the ‘post-pandemic’ world of work, we’re starting to see ambivalent relationships emerge again.”

Methot has been doing research to better understand how and why friendships necessarily blur work and non-work boundaries to create unique tensions. That holds true for both remote and in-person work as well.

“It’s important for people to understand how to balance when we’re exposing our personal or intimate information to someone who we work with, and the paradox and the complications that come along with that,” she said. “A lot of people want to have those close relationships and those experiences with the people who they work with but maybe don’t really understand how that can turn against them.

“The issue with workplace friendships that makes them distinct and unique from relationships or friendships outside of work is that the shared space is the office, and so the friendship is founded on a professional work relationship, and those two things tend to compete with each other.”

Especially for team members of comparable seniority, it can be difficult to reconcile the fact that they are collaborating with each other at the same time that they may be competing with each other.

“A formal work relationship is transactional, professional, and non-discretionary, versus our private, more discretionary, informal friendships, and those two things tend to conflict with each other,” Methot said. “How do we balance these paradoxes or tensions that we end up facing when we try to become friends with people who we work with?

“It ends up potentially creating these rivalries—we might be both going up for the same promotion,” she said. “I want to be proud of my friend and happy for him or her, but I’m also jealous, and so this started leading into my research understanding how we feel ambivalently towards our friendships.

“Work friends must deal with this emotion of ambivalence, where we might feel joy or pride and jealousy, and the question is, ‘How do we balance those emotions?’”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Shadow Networks Foster Collaboration

By Daniel Butcher

People often collaborate with colleagues across departments in ways that benefit their organization, sometimes sparking inter-team creativity and productivity. Human resources (HR) can either kindle or pour cold water on those fires.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who cowrote an Academy of Management Review article on this topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College and David Allen of Texas Christian University and University of Warwick—said that managers routinely search for ways to foster collaboration and break down silos by rotating employees or creating cross-functional teams. Other effective tactics include fostering networks through company retreats or company-sponsored volunteer service among employees across departments.

“I’m really interested in the interactions and communication among employees in a way that is outside the formal organizational chart,” Methot said. “The functioning of the informal organization is often a shadow network behind the official organizational chart.

“We know that there’s a lot of dynamics that occur in the ways that people interact and communicate and build trust and develop friendships and gossip in organizations, and organizational leaders often try to prioritize building a climate or a culture where people are creating these types of networks, where they feel a sense of psychological safety and are comfortable sharing information and asking questions,” she said. “But they don’t often know exactly what HR policies are going are going to affect those networks, and how they’re going to affect those networks.

“It’s crucial to track and analyze how a formal HR policy impacts the informal infrastructure in an organization, how people are interacting with each other, whether they form mentoring relationships or developmental relationships with each other, and whether they form close friendships, even when they traditionally had only worked together as team members.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

How Tech Can Support Connecting via Remote Work

By Daniel Butcher

Some people hate virtual meetings and calls and prefer face-to-face in-person interactions. Others are uncomfortable in a traditional office setting and prefer communicating in ways that are mediated by technology. Many people fall somewhere in between. But small talk is valuable for everyone.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who cowrote an Academy of Management Journal article on that topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College, Patrick Downes of the University of Kansas, and Allison Gabriel of Purdue University—said that she has talked to a lot of people whose teams or organizations are now using Slack, Teams, or other communication software and provided the following advice:

“Set up informal interaction channels over Slack to give employees an outlet where they can talk about exercise or leisure or any hobbies that they have that doesn’t necessarily have to implicate work-related topics,” Methot said. “Giving them an outlet to talk informally with each other can be really helpful.”

This doesn’t always apply to, say, neurodivergent individuals or other people with disabilities or people who are from minoritized backgrounds, or even expatriates, she noted.

“Small talk is actually really challenging for people who don’t understand American norms, and we’ve heard that from a lot of immigrants, expatriates who don’t have the context for how to get involved in the conversations with those familiar with a particular country’s cultural norms and trends,” Methot said. “For Americans, it seems accepted and relatively normal.

“We understand that it’s polite to engage in conversation, but we talk about topics that they might not be familiar with, things related to hobbies or sports or network television, and they feel excluded,” she said

“Also, the idea of returning to the office might not feel as accepting or welcoming for certain populations, like those who are neurodivergent.”

While many people bemoan the disruption to traditional nine-to-five office schedules, for many others such as parents and people with disabilities, remote or hybrid work arrangements are a breath of fresh air.

“For some people, technology has really vastly improved their social circles, work-life balance, and ability to present themselves more authentically,” Methot said.

“Stigmatized groups might struggle to live and work in their environment when they have disabilities, or for individuals who are neurodivergent, it’s harder for them to form in-person connections, and so interacting online can really be a lifeline for them,” she said.

“I want to make sure that I’m addressing the fact that encouraging small talk isn’t a blanket set of practices or results that apply to everyone.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile