Corporate Philanthropic Responses to Emergent Human Needs: The Role of Organizational Attention Focus

Abstract

Research on corporate philanthropy typically focuses on organization-external pressures and aggregated donation behavior. Hence, our understanding of the organization-internal structures that determine whether a given organization will respond philanthropically to a specific human need remains underdeveloped. We explicate an attention-based framework in which specific dimensions of organization-level attention focus interact to predict philanthropic responses to an emergent human need. Exploring the response of Fortune Global 500 firms to the 2004 South Asian tsunami, we find that management attention focused on people inside the organization (employees) interacts with both attention for places (countries in the tsunami-stricken region) and attention for practices (corporate philanthropy in general) to predict the likelihood of charitable donations. Our research thus extends beyond the prevailing institutional perspective by highlighting the role of attention focus in corporate responsiveness to emergent societal issues.

Organizational attention to corporate social responsibility and corporate social performance: the moderating effects of corporate governance

“…Measuring organizational attention focus is challenging because attention focus cannot be observed directly (Nadkarni & Barr ; Ocasio ). To address this challenge, previous studies suggest a direct and functional method to measure organizational attention focus – content analysis of company annual reports (e.g., Nadkarni & Barr ; Ocasio ; Muller & Whiteman ). Annual reports include public and official statements made by managers to discuss the strategic issues that they believe are important to their firms (Osborne et al .…”

“…In general, attention focus refers to the degree to which a decision‐maker's “subjective representations of the external environment are dominated by concepts related to one (or more) domain over others” (Nadkarni & Barr, : 1397; Muller & Whiteman ). The behavioral theory of firms views organizations as problem‐solving entities with limited attentional capacity and suggests that organizational decisions and actions are determined by how managers allocate their attention to various objectives (Cyert & March ).…”

“…; Chen et al . ), emerging technologies (Eggers & Kaplan ), and social issues (Muller & Whiteman ). In this sense, managers can also attend to social issues because addressing the social issues raised by stakeholders has been considered an important organizational objective (Freeman ; Factor et al .…”

“…Recently, several scholars have examined the antecedents of CSP from a socio‐cognitive approach (Mitchell et al . ; Muller & Whiteman ). This literature argues that CSP will be improved as managers pay more attention to social issues (Agle et al .…”

Supply chain uncertainty and environmental management

“…This second principle emphasizes on the 'situation' as a key determinant of the manager's attention focus. For example, Muller and Whiteman (2015) suggest that a corporation's geographical proximity to emerging human needs (e.g., from a natural disaster) amplifies its philanthropic response to those needs. Finally, each organization have policies and procedures that guide the limited managerial attention to specific issues (Ocasio, 2011).…”