Shifting an organization’s temporal order can be a key mechanism for accomplishing organizational change, but it is also fundamentally problematic: instead of helping an organization accomplish change, it may simply reinforce an already failing course of action. Our current understanding of the roles that temporal shifts play in enabling organizational change is inconclusive in terms of when and how temporal shifts contribute to the success of organizational change. We exploit an in-depth case study of a new digitalized design approach implemented at Advanced Construction to demonstrate how a temporal shift can increase temporal awareness, among organizational members, of the salient and differing temporalities involved. In this case, the increased temporal awareness facilitated improved temporal coordination, which in turn figured prominently in making actual change possible. Our study identifies three complementary roles of change-inducing temporal shifts—namely, in connection with past experience, current activities, and future directions. Thus, we develop a deeper understanding of the relation between temporal shifts and organizational change while offering a novel account of how the establishment of a temporal zone harbors those three roles of temporal shifts.

改变组织的时间顺序可能是完成组织变革的关键机制，但从根本上讲也是有问题的：除了帮助组织实现变革之外，它可能只是在加强已经失败的行动。就时间变化如何以及如何促进组织变化的成功而言，我们目前对时间变化在促进组织变革中扮演的角色的理解尚无定论。我们利用在Advanced Construction中实施的一种新的数字化设计方法的深入案例研究，来演示时间偏移如何提高组织成员对所涉及的显着和不同的时间性的时间意识。在这种情况下，增强的时间意识有助于改善时间协调性，反过来，在使实际更改成为可能的过程中，这一点尤为突出。我们的研究确定了导致变化的时间变化的三个互补作用，即与过去的经验，当前的活动和未来的方向有关。因此，我们对时间转移与组织变化之间的关系有了更深入的了解，同时提供了关于时区建立如何包含时间转移的这三个角色的新颖解释。