Debates about short-termism in business tend to center around the role of shareholder pressures and managers' incentives, while the role of organizational structure remains understudied. In our paper, we adopt an attention-based lens to elucidate the role of organizational structure in directing the attention of management towards pressures for shortterm results at the expense of the long term. Specifically, we argue that greater operational scale, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and workforce flexibility reduce slack resources available to senior managers and increase the complexity of information presented to them in different ways. As a result, the senior managers shift their attention to short-term pressures, which are more easily understood, at the expense of attention for long-term considerations. Analysis based on a survey of senior managers in 3,221 private firms in the Netherlands provides support for our arguments.

No abstract

Purpose Subsidiaries use their weight and/or voice to get attention for the initiatives they share with the headquarters. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether subsidiaries with a low weight can effectively use their voice to get the headquarters’ attention. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a combination of the attention-based view of the firm and the issue-selling literature applied to the context of subsidiaries selling their initiatives to the headquarters of a multinational corporation. Findings Subsidiaries with a low weight are trapped in a vicious circle in which they are unable to get more influence and gain a central position in the organization through the initiative-taking approach. This problem may mainly be attributed to their limited access to (or even entire lack of) direct and rich communication with the headquarters, which impedes the ability of these subsidiaries to gain knowledge about headquarters and the organization in general. As a result, low-weight subsidiaries are unable to make the correct decisions about which selling moves to use regarding initiatives that are able to capture headquarters’ attention; this inability means that they are less likely to gain approval from headquarters for implementing the proposed initiatives. Originality/value Subsidiary voice is not an accessible and effective bottom-up tool available to low-weight subsidiaries for gaining influence, which is contrary to what is claimed by extant mainstream research in international business and strategy. Hence, subsidiaries with low weight are completely marginalized from the sharing of subsidiary initiatives that takes place within multinational corporations.

This paper investigates how information processing channels can be managed such that relevant and novel information about the environment is gathered despite attention biases of top managers and challenges to maintain motivation levels of information providers. We argue that organizations need open and transparent information processing channels, which make top managers accountable. Furthermore, middle managers dedicated to managing these channels who act as a bridge between the information providers and the top managers help to reduce the information overload for top managers. This increases the likelihood that top managers will take appropriate action on the information provided and give suitable feedback to the senders. Lastly, these actions will only be beneficial when they are aligned with company strategy and values. Having multiple information channels can create a challenge for top

No abstract