Keep Your Eye on the Ball or on the Field? Executive Strategic Attention and Performance

Markets offer competing narratives to executives: keep your eye on the ball and focus, but also fight complacency by staying in tune with a wide set of potential strategies to maintain flexibility and opportunity recognition. Scholars offer little help to resolve this conflict in strategic priorities, echoing these two logics in parallel streams of research. In this paper we provide new insight into the nature of executive attention by developing and validating a new tool for assessing top executive attention to a range of strategic priorities. We then closely examine how the breadth of strategies to which executives pay attention varies across industries and over time, and investigate how the breadth of executive attention influences performance under varying industry conditions. We find that focused executive attention has a consistent positive effect on firm performance, except in stagnant growth industries. Under these low growth conditions, the value of increased strategic flexibility associated with attention to a broader array of strategies overcomes penalties from reduced strategic focus to improve performance.