Research on Managerial Attention : A State of the Art Review.

Understanding how an organization allocates and manages its decision-makers' attention is of primary importance to the interpretation of organizational behavior. Extant research has shown that managerial attention is closely related to a firm's innovation, entrepreneurship, strategic decision-making, and internationalization. This paper begins by introducing the definition, measurement, and metatheories of managerial attention. Next, it focuses on reviewing the relationships between managerial attention and firm behavior such as innovation, entrepreneurship, strategic decision-making, and internationalization. Finally, it addresses the limitations of existing research on managerial attention and future research opportunities. Scholars define managerial attention as the noticing, encoding, interpreting, and focusing of time and effort by organizational decision-makers on issues and their solutions. Managerial attention is shaped by both top-down (schema-driven) and bottom-up (stimulus-driven) attentional processes. It can be classified into three ideal types, i. e., attentional perspective, attentional engagement, and attentional selection. The measurement of managerial attention is critical to empirical studies. There are three main measurement methods of managerial attention in extant literature, i. e., content analysis, questionnaire survey and case study. The content analysis method is the most commonly used for measuring managerial attention. Five metatheories, i. e., the behavioral theory of the firm, managerial cognition, issue selling, attention-based view of the firm, and ecology of attention are commonly cited to study attentional structures, processes, and outcomes. The behavioral theory of the firm views organizations as problem-solving entities with limited attentional capacity. The metatheory of managerial cognition views organizations as interpretation systems, and it contends that enactment and sense-making, rather than goals and decision making, are central to organizations and organizing. The metatheory of issue selling views managerial attention of senior management as a scarce resource for which middle managers and other organizational members compete. The attention-based view of the firm takes firms as systems of structurally distributed attention. The ecological perspective of attention primarily looks on attention as salience and treats selective attention as more of a bottom-up process. According to extant literature, the research on the relationship between managerial attention and firms' innovative behavior primarily investigates the internal mechanisms of top managers' attention affecting firms' behavior of technological, organizational, management, and marketing innovations. The research on the relationship between managerial attention and firms' entrepreneurial behavior focuses on exploring the mechanisms of managerial attention allocations in the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition process. The research on the relationship between managerial attention and firms' strategic decision-making behavior mainly investigates the influencing mechanism of top management teams' attention allocations on firms' strategic choice and response. The research on the relationship between managerial attention and internationalization behavior focuses on investigating the influencing mechanism of top managers' attention on firms' global strategic position and their internationalization performance. These studies may provide new insight into the understanding of a firm's behavior, but there are still some limitations. In conclusion, the research on managerial attention is still in the pre-paradigm phase, and many critical scientific problems are expected to be solved by scholars. Taking the existing research findings and theoretical development into account, it is believed that more research is needed in the following three aspects: (1) To develop more research methods of managerial attention. According to the methodological fit in management field research, future research can use qualitative, quantitative or mixed research methods based on the needs of research questions. (2) To lucubrate the mechanisms of managerial attention which affect firm behavior. (3) To further explore the factors which affect the allocation of managerial attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]