CEO entrepreneurial orientation, human resource management systems, and employee innovative behavior: An attention‐based view

Abstract Research Summary Chief executive officer (CEO) entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is an emerging topic within entrepreneurship research. This research offers the attention‐based view (ABV), and its principles of attentional focus, situated attention, and structural distribution of attention to explain how CEO EO fosters an innovative organizational workforce. We theorize that CEO EO predicts lower‐level employee innovative behavior when their top managerial attentional focus on entrepreneurship is translated into high‐performance work practices, which structurally distribute their strategic attention throughout the organization and promotes a situated attentional condition for employees emphasizing innovation. Moreover, we consider (a) human‐resource management (HRM) perceived importance and (b) departmental functional foci as boundary conditions. Using a multi‐level and multi‐source sample from 152 Chinese firms, results support our arguments. Managerial Summary Employee innovative behavior is critical to firm growth, renewal, and sustainability. By collecting and analyzing data on 2745 employees nested in 586 departments nested in 152 organizations, we examine the critical role that human resource management (HRM) systems and high‐performance work practices may play in translating a CEOs emphasis on entrepreneurial activity into employee innovative behavior. We offer and observe support for an attention‐based perspective that HRM systems serve as “attentional structures” which channel CEO preferences to lower‐organizational levels. Our results further indicate that an embrace of HRM as a strategic priority among top managers, as well as whether employees are in “boundary spanning” input–output areas of the business, to be meaningful factors which strengthen the effect of HRM‐based attentional structures upon employee innovative behavior.