Effective Firm Alignment with SIGEL Crises: The Temporal Mindsets of Decision Makers

When COVID‐19 hit, a surprising, intractable, global, existential, and lingering (SIGEL) crisis was unleashed, creating challenges unknown to humankind. To avoid failure, firms’ realignment to fit this SIGEL crisis became necessary. Yet, not all firms realigned. Why? Because of these firms' decision makers' temporal mindsets or their interpretative lenses about time. Contrary to the assumption that fast crisis response is essential, we argue and find that decision makers' time urgency (i.e., innate self‐imposed pressure to act quickly) hinders their firms' effective alignment. While past focus (i.e., innate tendency to attend to the past) had ‘o effect on effective firm alignment, present focus (i.e., innate tendency to attend to the present) and future focus (i.e., innate tendency to attend to the future) had a positive effect. Interestingly, data show that the co‐existence of (1) high future, low present, and low past and (2) high future, high present, and high past foci in decision makers' minds drive the most effective firm alignment, but (3) low future, low present, and low past foci drive the least. Using US and UK panel data, we show, conceptually and empirically, the importance of temporal mindsets to firm alignment with SIGEL crises.