Organizational change.

Although temporal issues affecting organizations and leaders have been researched, time orientation (preference for one or more of the present, past, and future time frames) and visioning ability of change agents within organizations remain open for additional investigation. This exploratory survey study compared self-reported time orientation (TO) and visioning ability ratings of administrators and faculty at a community college. The research added to the extant literature by contextualizing the measures of the key constructs and extending the research to a novel setting.
Scores for all three time frames were assessed in contrast to studies that emphasize future orientation. In addition, TO measures were obtained using an instrument constructed specifically for organizations (Fortunato & Furey, 2009). An adapted version of a visioning ability by Thoms and Blasko (1999) was constructed to address a specified time depth (the distant future) and domains relevant to higher education.
Administrators reported significantly higher ratings than faculty on Future TO and visioning ability measures. Future TO scores for faculty were lower in relation to scores on the other two TO scales, but no within-group TO differences were found for administrators. A multiple regression model indicated that Future TO was the best predictor of visioning ability. Faculty teaching in the Associate of Science areas had higher Present TO scores than those teaching in the Associate of Arts programs. TO
and visioning ability did not change as a function of gender, age, culture, and years of experience in higher education.
The interpretation of the findings was limited by the lack of benchmarks that allow for meaningful comparisons across organizations, and by a continued need to establish construct and predictive validity for the key measures. The research has implications for hiring decisions, for staff development, and for temporal profiling in organizations interested in envisioning the distant future.

To be successful, organizations that undertake a large-scale planned change initiative must maintain employee commitment and loyalty to the organization. Identification with the organization can support that objective and is crucial in changing organizations when managers often introduce different cultural assumptions, values, and norms than those held by the organization's members. Employee identification with the organization is also pivotal in the employee's decision making process. This study analyses a representative sample of an organization's newsletter published during a reengineering project. Identification strategies of common ground, the assumed we, antithesis and unifying symbols are used as the foundation for analysis. Results show that identification strategies are consistently used in this genre of organizational communication to maintain employee commitment during a change initiative. In addition, three additional tactics of the common ground strategy were uncovered: enlistment, self-congratulation and knowledge-sharing. The implications of these results are discussed.