The timing of employee participation is assumed to influence the outcomes of the planned change projects. However, a conceptualization of the timing of employee participation and related time-facets, such as duration and timeliness, is still lacking. Most references, if any, to the timing are ambiguous and current frameworks to dimension employee participation are incomplete when it comes to the timing. This study aims to explore the conceptualization of the timing of employee participation and related time-facets in planned change. We included 101 peer-reviewed articles, collected from Web of Science and Scopus. We contribute by proposing the timing of employee participation as a new component, with which we place employee participation into a temporal dimension. We also identified three time-factors, subject to the subjective experience of those undergoing the employee participation initiative: timeliness, synchronicity, and subjective mental time travels. These factors may vary with different timings and result in various personal and organizational level change outcomes. These insights help to improve successful change implementation. Our conceptualization helps to reduce the conceptual ambiguity of employee participation. It enhances theory-building theory as it helps to better compare definitions of researched employee participation initiatives and their outcomes.
