Sally Blount
Gregory Janicik

This paper examines how conflict about the pacing of shared activities can affect actors meeting across product, functional and/or national lines. Findings from two simulations involving 360 executive- and MBA-level participants illustrate the substantive and relational costs of temporal asynchrony. Specifically, when participants were paired such that their temporal pacing goals were misaligned (i.e., the dyad was “out-of-synch”), the parties achieved lower quality outcomes than when the parties’ pacing goals were aligned (i.e., the dyad was “in-synch”). These findings illuminate the challenges of temporal coordination in flexible organizational structures and the role of synchrony in building social networks.