This study aims to explore how leaders’ deadline-oriented pacing style, conceptualized as a distinct temporal leadership behavior, can transform time pressure into an enabler of radical innovation. Integrating conservation of resources (COR) theory with a knowledge management (KM) lens, the authors examine the cognitive and knowledge-sharing mechanisms through which deadline-oriented pacing promotes radical innovation, and the organizational conditions under which this process is strengthened.
Data were collected from 246 supervisor–subordinate dyads across 74 technology-driven startups in China. Structural equation modeling with cluster-robust standard errors and Monte Carlo confidence intervals, complemented by conventional bootstrap intervals, was used to test the moderated serial mediation model.
The results support the proposed model. Leaders’ deadline-oriented pacing positively predicts radical innovation through sequential mediation by employees’ challenge time pressure appraisal and tacit knowledge sharing. Furthermore, perceived tolerance for failure strengthens the effect of deadline-oriented pacing on challenge time pressure appraisal and amplifies the overall indirect effect on radical innovation.
Leaders can strategically apply time pacing to stimulate breakthrough innovation when employees perceive deadlines as challenges rather than constraints. To maximize benefits, organizations should cultivate an environment of tolerance for failure that legitimizes experimentation and short-term failure, thereby encouraging tacit knowledge exchange and collective learning essential for radical innovation.
This study advances temporal leadership theory by reconceptualizing deadline-oriented pacing as a proactive leadership behavior rather than a dispositional trait, revealing conditions under which deadline focus becomes innovation-enabling rather than detrimental. It extends KM theory by showing how challenge time pressure appraisal can counter the documented tendency toward knowledge hiding under time pressure, unlocking tacit knowledge sharing as the critical behavioral pathway to radical innovation. By theorizing why this mechanism should be particularly consequential for radical rather than incremental innovation, and identifying perceived tolerance for failure as a boundary condition, this study adds precision to the emerging literature on temporal leadership and knowledge-driven innovation.
