Organizational Polyrhythm in Family MNEs: Temporal Governance across Global North and Global South

How multinational enterprises (MNEs) coordinate interdependent activities across heterogeneous contexts remains a central question in international business research. While prior studies emphasize structural, relational, and institutional mechanisms, time has rarely been theorized as an explicit dimension of multinational governance. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study of ALPLA, a large family-owned MNE operating across Global North and Global South contexts, we examine how family leadership shapes temporal governance. We analyze how increasing scale amplified temporal complexity, resulting in coordination breakdowns and declining reliability. In response, the family CEO mobilized the authority, long-term orientation, and sense of belonging inherent in family ownership to introduce a shared temporal architecture that reframed time as subject of governance. We introduce organizational polyrhythm as a family-legitimated practice transfer through which coordination is achieved via a shared temporal script specifying synchronizing mechanisms, while allowing local discretion in enactment.