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This article seeks to answer the following research question: How does the focus of attention and situated attention contribute to the formulation and implementation of the service orientation in the business strategy?

Structural equation modelling is used as a research methodology.

The paper suggests that the formation and implementation of service orientation in the business strategy is influenced strongly by managerial attention.

The results suggest that a survey is suitable for investigating managerial cognition and attention, but future research should benefit from obtaining data on managerial attention through interviews or secondary data such as company documents.

The main effect on strategy implementation and the moderating role of situated attention suggest that managers should be aware of the potential inertia by implementing a service‐oriented business strategy. The main effects for strategy formulation suggest that the formulation of a service‐oriented business strategy is triggered through decreasing product margins in the case of product‐oriented companies, whereas it is triggered by increasing customer expectations for service‐oriented companies.

The study examines the moderating effects of focus of managerial attention and situated management attention on the service orientation of business strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how in a situation of a crisis can Management Accounting Systems (MAS) create tensions in attention to information between top and line managers.

The study is based on a field study.

The findings based on an attention-based view on organizations demonstrate how change to an MAS introduced to handle the crisis failed to integrate top and line managers’ attention toward the common issues. Tightening of budget control was an expected response in such a situation. However, this change produced rather the opposite result – attention to information articulated by the top and line managers became even more disintegrated. This was visible in terms of different interpretations of both the reasons and the strategy of how to get out of the crisis – this is what we call a tension in attention.

The study is subject to the usual limitations of case-based research.

Implications from the study is that there is a need for caution about how managers move in the beginning of the crisis because the initial response sets a tone and trajectory of the crisis. In practice, this means that sense making processes are important in an early stage of a crisis to avoid tensions in attention between different groups in the organization.

The authors argued that little research has been conducted so far regarding what information managers focus their attention on in organizations under financial distress conditions. The originality is the use of an attention-based view together with organizational psychology to understand this area.

Drawing upon upper echelon, regulatory focus and attention theories and focusing on SMEs, the purpose of this paper is to answer questions on how the motivational disposition (promotion vs. prevention regulatory focus) of CEOs affects their information search patterns (i.e. search selection and intensity) and consequently organizational level engagement in different types of innovation activities (exploration vs. exploitation).

A quantitative study was conducted collecting data from the CEOs of SMEs operating in the dynamic wine and spirits industry in Greece. The data were collected in two independent time streams and the proposed theoretical model was tested by applying OLS regression analysis.

The current research provides evidence that differences in CEOs’ level of promotion and prevention focus trigger different information search selection and search intensity patterns. Nonetheless, the attention to innovation components act as mediators only in the hypothesized relationships between a CEO's level of prevention and promotion focus and exploration. Paradoxically, filtered through attention to innovation and triggered from the same motive, that is to reduce negative emotions, promotion focus CEOs choose to direct resources to exploitation and avoid investing in exploration, whilst the opposite was supported for prevention focus CEOs.

The results highlight the important role of a CEO's regulatory focus orientation in promoting diverse attention to innovation patterns and firm-level innovation tendencies towards exploration and/or exploitation.

This study's contributions extend and combine the theories of regulatory focus, UET and attention in the field of managerial/entrepreneurship behavior and innovation. Therefore, they are valuable for understanding the determinants of firm-level innovation choices (exploration vs. exploitation) in SMEs.

The 2008–2009 financial crisis has renewed concerns about managerial short-termism and its negative effects. Based on intertemporal choice theory, this chapter aims to identify the role that performance measurement and compensation systems can play in orienting managers toward building long-term performance potential in addition to achieving short-term results.

The findings suggest that certain types of measures used – in particular broader, more inclusive financial indicators, risk-adjusted measures, and key nonfinancial value drivers – as well as the timing of measurement and payment of rewards can lead to reduced time discounting and a lower devaluation of the future, and consequently to a prioritized managerial attention focus on long-term company goals.

This chapter contributes to a better understanding of the institutional determinants of managerial long-term orientation and the influence of organizational systems on goal prioritization in managerial intertemporal choice processes.

The findings have practical relevance for the design of incentive systems that aim to place an emphasis on ensuring long-term value creation.

Systems that guide managerial behavior toward the long term can help to increase economic and societal sustainability.

Despite the emergence of more integrated performance measurement approaches, time horizon has not been in the main focus of research in the field yet. This review provides a first structured overview of the temporal effects of different elements of performance measurement and compensation systems.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the sequential application of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) five‐step focusing process in improving the effectiveness of a service process that was limiting the performance of the entire service system.

The five‐step approach is schematically presented with each step being described and evaluated relative to its role in effective constraint management. A detailed example provides additional insights and nuances into its use in managing the constraint within a banking organization's subsystem, namely, the loan application and approval process. This hypothetical, realistic, and comprehensive illustration iterates through several cycles of the five‐step focusing process to demonstrate how managers are able to address different types of constraints.

The paper provides a detailed description on how each of the five‐steps can be used to improve the organization's performance relative to its stated goal by focusing management's attention on the system's (or an aligned subsystem's) leverage or control point. Major types of constraints include physical or capacity limitations and restrictive policies. Constraints may be located either internal or external to the process or system being managed.

Various managerial implications are discussed including: the relevance and utility of applying the TOC five‐step focusing process in services; advantages associated with utilizing this structured approach for continuous improvement in services; and some strategic issues associated with the placement of the ubiquitous system constraint.

Although the successful application of the five‐step focusing process has been well documented in improving manufacturing processes, this paper provides an illustrative tutorial which details its application in effectively managing a service process.

This study aims to investigate the effects of CEO gender on social enterprise (SE) value creation and the moderating effect of selective attention on SEs’ dual goals (i.e. relative attention to social versus economic goals).

The authors surveyed 596 active Taiwanese SEs to rate independent and moderating variables and received 191 responses (109 female and 82 male CEOs). The authors used external SE experts to evaluate each SE’s economic and social value creation, lowering the threat of common method bias and enhancing data quality.

Social value creation is higher with female chief executive officer (CEOs) (than with male CEOs), whereas economic value creation tends to be lower. But, attentional selection (i.e. changes in attention) to economic goals by female CEOs mitigates the negative relationship between female CEOs and economic value creation.

Gender diversity in the top management team is critical for dual-goal attainment. Decision-makers’ attention focus could vary along with the situation to achieve the desired outcomes. Thus, creating an attention structure under a given situation may help guide the decision-making process toward the desired performance for SEs.

Little research brings the attention-based view to investigate the effects of managerial gender roles on the dual-goal performance (i.e. social versus economic value creation) of SEs and test its contingency, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to do so. This study also adopted a unique research design asking outside SE experts to provide the performance data.

This study updates the discussion on demand-pull attention as a source of radical product innovation. Demand-pull attention shows an ex ante alignment with market characteristics and needs as opposed to pushing resources toward markets. The authors suggest a holistic framework and specify three dimensions of demand-pull attention: anticipated or revealed market demand, market environment, and external economic environment. Based on a large German longitudinal panel consisting of 941 firm-year observations from 2003 to 2013, the authors conceptualized the measurement of demand-pull dimensions’ attention and radical product innovation using computer-aided text analysis of annual reports. The authors analyzed the relationship between the attention that a firm pays to different demand-pull dimensions and the firm’s strategic intention to radically innovate; thus, the authors actually focused on the cognitive sources of radical product innovations. This chapter suggests that radical product innovation activities are positively driven by attention toward the market environment and market demand orientation. However, the hypothesis, which assumed a negative relationship between attention toward the external economic environment and radical innovation, could not be significantly confirmed. This demands a closer look into the underlying decision processes of firms when deciding on radical product innovations. With the theoretical grounding on the attention-based view of the firm, the authors contribute to a better understanding of the role that organizational cognition plays in innovation processes.

The purpose of this study is to integrate research on competitive and cooperative repertoires and to simultaneously assess the direct, indirect and curvilinear effects of competitive and cooperative action repertoires in relation to firm performance.

The analyses are conducted using a longitudinal dual-industry sample of publicly traded firms, including over 6,500 competitive actions and 750 cooperative actions. The authors use fixed effects (FE) regression models to test the diminishing returns of action volume on firm performance as well as the moderating effects of action diversity.

The results suggest that increasing competitive and cooperative actions yields diminishing returns in relation to firm performance. Furthermore, in the context of competitive action repertoire diversity, increased diversity magnifies the diminishing returns of competitive action volume on firm performance.

The study provides a firm-level conceptualization of overall competitive and cooperative repertoires to extend the literature on competition and cooperation beyond dyadic interactions or structural determinants of competitive and cooperative actions.

Macro- and microorganizational perspectives on strategy processes are typically treated as distinct lines of inquiry. This paper proposes an attention-based theory (March & Olsen, 1976; Ocasio, 1997) of strategy formulation processes to bridge both perspectives. In particular, it links evolutionary perspectives on strategy (Burgelman, 1991, 2002) and strategic choice (Child, 1972) perspectives on organizational and strategic decision making (Bower, 1970; Carter, 1971; Cyert & March, 1963; Frederickson, 1986). Our treatment of the strategy process extends theory by viewing strategy processes as assemblages of tightly and loosely coupled networks of operational and governance channels (Allison & Zelikow, 1999; Ocasio, 1997), strategy formulation as a fluid and distributed process, and environmental, organizational level and individual level forces as consequential. Like Lovas and Ghoshal (2000), we view strategy formulation as a process of guided evolution. Unlike Lovas and Ghoshal who view strategic intent as the objective function that guides evolution, we view strategy formulation processes as more fragmented and contested, with multiple foci of attention, rather than an explicit objective function, and both top-down and bottoms-up processes capable of generating changes in the strategic direction of the firm.

In this chapter, we present a theory on how organizational performance feedback influences individual decision-maker cognitions and thereby changes a team’s attention focus in terms of strategy. We argue that when performance compares unfavorably to aspiration levels, decision-makers reconsider current strategies in favor of unfamiliar, uncertain ones and become more risk tolerant. Furthermore, as decision-makers devote additional cognitive resources to do so, changes in attention focus in a decision-making team will be observed. Using data from a business simulation and repeated questionnaires, we capture the teams’ attention focus and the organizational performance feedback evaluation process of the individuals and teams.