It is the neutralizer of all energy, matter, and relationships

Tug McGraw was a left-handed reliever for the Mets and Phillies from 1965 to 1984. He became one of the National League’s top closers. When facing the opposing team’s most fearsome hitters in the final innings, he invoked the “Frozen Snowball” theory. In billions of years, he said, the Earth will become an ice-covered lump. No one will be around to care about a baseball game.

He was referring to the broadly supported hypothesis of maximum entropy in physics. It predicts the heat death of the universe (aka the Big Chill, which as an old movie and a metaphor, still holds up… until it fizzles out at the end). That hypothesis states: As time flows toward its furthest horizon, it is the neutralizer of all energy, matter, and relationships. Time is the ultimate apex predator.

Similarly, it could be said that time is the master governor of all cause (X)-effect (Y) impacts in organizational science. When I describe a well-supported Big Idea^™ to practitioners or business students about such an X-Y impact, one of their very practical questions is: How long does it take? I rarely have a solid answer. I can usually give just a squishy, wide interval.

For example, it’s been widely demonstrated that an employee’s perceptions of inequity (X) lead directly to them withdrawing their work effort (Y). In other words, because things don’t seem fair to me, I’m going to lower the juice I put into my job. Is that impact immediate? How many days will go by before it reduces my motivation? Some finite amount of time, t (often referred to as a causal “lag”), must elapse before felt inequity results in slacking off.

Sadly, empirical research is often haphazard about the t lag. Sometimes t is held to 0 because perceived inequity and performance get measured simultaneously. Other times t is less than ~30 minutes because induced inequity and subsequent withdrawal get investigated in the behavioral lab. Still, other studies might allow t to stretch for weeks or months between when perceived inequity pops up and withdrawal occurs. As long as we observe an X-Y impact, we call it good. But we shouldn’t accommodate such fuzzy-as-soapsuds guesses about lags. A strong theory specifies the strength of the X-Y connection over intervening t. Time is a universal moderator. It can and should be (although it very often isn’t) included in the best Big Idea^™ propositions.

If incorporating that into your papers sounds about as fun as chronic appendicitis, let me approach it differently. When is X’s impact on Y at its maximum? How long does it last? Those questions deserve deeper thinking. The latter question — essentially about when the X-Y impact drops to 0 — is just as practical as the former. The answer likely reflects the predatory beast of time. At the human level, habituating and forgetting can nullify past impacts. New information and experiences crowd out the past. Perhaps a starting point for pulling time into your next theory would be to propose a single peaked X-Y push, with an exponential denouement. As t stretches further past its max effect, X-Y decay seems inevitable.

Sara Toynbee finds that decay in her research. She explores the curse and blessing of intervening time between an SEC regulator being hired from industry and the “pass” such a regulator gives to accounting statements of the firms being regulated. New (t is short) regulators plucked from industry see their prior firm’s clients through rosy lenses. That rosiness fades to nearly nothing as time (t grows longer) stalks the prey of those prior social ties.