Keep Your Eye on the Ball or on the Field? Exploring the Performance Implications of Executive Strategic Attention

Shedding Light on the Dark Side of Firm Lobbying: A Customer Perspective

“…Our investigation refines theory around these two different mechanisms, building from Ocasio’s (1997) foundational premises. Although ABV literature has proposed moderators that attenuate negative effects from loss of focus (e.g., Eklund and Mannor 2020), our study is the first to show that different forces can redirect firm attention by using distinct yet complementary means. Future research should continue to disentangle aligning and counterbalancing mechanisms regarding firm attention and the ability to maintain desirable sources of focus.…”

“…These communications are scrutinized by many stakeholders, and therefore, firms are intentional about what they share. Further, these communications should reflect firm priorities and key areas of strategic focus (Eklund and Mannor 2020). For example, prior research has linked such communications with the firm’s innovation priorities and outcomes (Yadav, Prabhu, and Chandy 2007).…”

“…The negative relationship between lobbying and customer satisfaction may be attenuated among firms that counterbalance lobbying with advertising spend and R&D spend. In their study of strategic attention and firm performance, Eklund and Mannor (2020) show that if firms with widely dispersed attention increase their R&D spending, they counterbalance negative effects of attention dispersion. Further, existing research finds that spending on R&D serves as a powerful signal to employees, customers, and other stakeholders that the firm prioritizes customer value creation and maintains a fundamental focus on innovation-related activities (Cho and Hambrick 2006; Rhee and Leonardi 2018).…”

Beggars can be choosers: Resource scarcity, dynamism, search activities, and their joint impact on performance

“…Dynamism in the environment may increase uncertainty about the future state of an industry, which, in turn, impacts the consequences of simultaneously combining exploratory and exploitative search (Fleming, 2001;Sidhu et al, 2007). Past research has conceptualized how the interplay between dynamism and scarcity creates fundamentally different environments (Dess and Beard, 1984), Research to date, nonetheless, has not investigated the implications of these environmental conditions together, but has postulated the importance of pursuing both exploration and exploitation in resource-scarce or dynamic environments (Cao et al, 2009;Eklund and Mannor, 2020;Jansen et al, 2006;Posen and Levinthal, 2012). To address this gap in the literature and to further specify the search-performance relationship, we ask the question: 'to what extent can firms capitalize on exploratory and exploitative search in resource-scarce environments, under conditions of high and low dynamism?…”

Call for papers: Special issue of Strategic Organization: Research Frontiers on the Attention-Based View of the Firm

“…While attention was originally defined in ABV as noticing, encoding, interpreting, and focusing of time and effort on both environmental and organizational stimuli as well as action alternatives (Ocasio, 1997: 189), subsequent work has identified a multiplicity of additional dimensions of attention. This includes research drawing a distinctions between attentional orientation, attentional vigilance, and attentional control (or executive attention; Ocasio, 2011), the quality versus the quantity of organizational attention (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006), the interaction of bottom-up and top-down attentional processes (Laureiro-Martinez, 2014; Shepherd et al, 2017), and attentional breadth versus depth (Eklund and Mannor, 2020).…”