Just Paying Attention: Communication for Organizational Attention

Abstract

The main premises in this article are that organizational attention is inherently communicative, and can be nurtured through communication interventions. Two communication practices that reflect organizational attention—information allocation and dialogue—can be nurtured through organizational structures and interventions. Increasing opportunities for dialogue across organizational functions is critical to improve collective attention. Prior research and empirical data are presented to assert that a long-term orientation is also imperative to develop attention through communication practices such as information allocation and dialogue.

Keywords

dialogue information allocation long-term orientation organizational attention

Timely responses to environmental issues throughout an organization are required to adapt to changes in organizational environments (Huber, 2004). Organizations need to stay constantly attentive to changes in internal and external environments (Bettis & Hitt, 1995; D’Aveni, 1994). The costs of not being attentive can range from missed business opportunities to disasters such as the space shuttle’s tragic explosion depicted by Tompkins (2005) as a communication failure. Organizational attention is defined herein as the collective identification of immediate and nonimmediate threats and opportunities both within and outside the organization. This collective attention is based on communicative interactions because organizational members need to engage in constructing meaning and allocating information about emerging issues throughout the organization (Novak & Sellnow, 2009; Ocasio, 1997). Information allocation—the voluntary crafting of a message containing unsolicited information held by an organizational actor and which could be relevant to diverse members in the organization (Gómez & Ballard, 2013; Huang, 2009)—requires organizational members to create shared interpretations through their dialogic relationships (Jian, 2007).

The main contribution in this article is the proposition of communication practices that promote organizational attention. There are natural tendencies against organizational attention, referred herein as organizational myopia. Myopia reflects “the tendency to overlook distant times [the long-term], distant places [other functional areas], and failures” (Levinthal & March, 1993, p. 95). In order to avoid overlooking the long term and issues emerging in other areas, organizations need structures that promote information allocation and dialogue. Thus, this article explores the relationship between information allocation, dialogue, and structures such as a focus on the long term, as well as communication interventions that may increase organizational attention. Communication interventions can range from the facilitation of a meeting, to developing formal sites for dialogue and reflection. The impetus in this article is to go beyond describing attention as inherently communicative and focusing on how to use these communication structures and processes to overcome the natural myopic tendencies of organizational members.

Organizational attention in this article follows a distributed cognition view that necessarily requires communication (Ocasio, 1997). In this sense, organizational attention as conceived in this article complements mindfulness—based on individual mental processes and cognitions (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006). Organizational attention is consistent with Weick and Sutcliffe’s (2006) mindfulness because it implies interruptions from “automaticity, routine, mindlessness, habit, path dependence, momentum, and inertia” (p. 515). The difference between organizational attention in this article and mindfulness is that the disruption from routines does not only “stirs the cognitive pot” (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006, p. 516) but also includes a dialogic collective sensemaking process through the interaction of several organizational members.

To advance a communicative view of organizational attention, the next section describes Ocasio’s (1997) attention-based view of organizations, highlighting the importance of information allocation. Furthermore, because information allocation requires the coconstruction of meaning, the importance of engaging in dialogue (Jian, 2007) through collective storytelling is introduced. Then, the article addresses the natural tendency to be inattentive, due to three forms of organizational myopia: focusing on the here, focusing on the now, and overlooking the risk of failure.

An Attention-Based View of Organizations

Building on Simon’s (1947) behavioral theory of the firm, Ocasio (1997) suggests an attention-based view of organizations where organizational actions reflect the coordinated attention of organizational members. To Ocasio (1997), attention reflects

to encompass the noticing, encoding, interpreting, and focusing of time and effort by organizational decision-makers on both (a) issues; the available repertoire of categories for making sense of the environment: problems, opportunities, and threats; and (b) answers: the available repertoire of action alternatives: proposals, routines, projects, programs, and procedures. (p. 189)

At the organizational level, noticing, coding, and interpreting issues is necessarily a collective process achieved through communication. Even in the case of issues and responses apparently developed by organizational individuals, these individuals’ interpretive frameworks most likely emerged from an intersubjective process because individuals construct their organizational realities through conversation (Cooren, 2004). What appears to be an individual focus of attention has been socially constructed in prior organizational conversations and enacted when these individuals draw on organizational rules and resources (Giddens, 1984). Furthermore, organizational attention requires that the issues individuals attend to, what Ocasio’s (1997) refers to as distributed attention, feed back into an organization’s integrated attention. Because individual decision makers’ distributed attention needs to be coordinated, organizational attention needs to incorporate how issues and answers are shared—allocated—by individual decision makers throughout the organization, and hence integrated into collective action.

Ocasio (1997) suggests that communication and procedural channels embedded within the formal and informal patterns of communication will affect which environmental issues take the attention of organizational members. Attention at the organizational level requires organizational members to be “alert for firm-relevant information unrelated to their specific job responsibilities, and . . . communicate it to the relevant parties in the organization” (Huber, 2004, p. 55). This noticing process is informal and cannot be mandated or designed beforehand because issues that require attention may come from where organizations least expect them (Huber, 2004).

The relevance of emerging issues may be determined only in hindsight through retrospective sensemaking—making sense of the issue after the fact (Weick, 1995)—by the person using the information. Nevertheless, environmental sensing requires organizational members to recognize and allocate relevant issues in their environments even if these issues are unrelated to their organizational function (Huber, 2004; Teece, 2007). Information allocation thus becomes highly improbable in organizations that lack a shared understanding of the big picture because it requires organizational members from different functions to understand what issues are relevant and critical to other organizational functions. A shared understanding does not imply that all organizational members have the same information and knowledge. Rather, a shared understanding implies that organizational members have an awareness of how they relate to each other. In other words, shared understanding allows for “the distribution of information and knowledge among the co-producers so that the story can be told, or the report given collectively” (Cooren, 2004, p. 529) and necessarily requires these coproducers to know what the story is. Dialogue is the communication practice through which this shared story is cocreated by organizational members.

Information allocation requires identifying expertise across organizational members (Hollingshead & Brandon, 2003). Dialogue becomes critical because it can lead to a collective awareness of the organizational members’ position and assumptions about reality (Barge & Oliver, 2003). This collective awareness reflects learning that is achieved through the reflection on action-outcome linkages (Argyris & Schön, 1996; Schön, 1983; Scott, Allen, Bonilla, Baran, & Murphy, 2013). The collective reflection on action-outcome linkages is a social construction process that can be triggered through organizational storytelling to allow members to collectively make sense of the organization (Baruch, 2009).

A critical part of organizational sensemaking is structural ordering (Czarniawska, 2006). Organizational storytelling can trigger collective sensemaking because stories have a plot sequence (Baruch, 2009). In collective storytelling, all the participants own the story and cannot identify individual contributions (Hansen, Barry, Boje, & Hatch, 2007). Stories also allow organizations to engage in prospective sensemaking—projecting future events as if they had happened (Boje & Gomez, 2008). Collective sensemaking through storytelling is not imposed by one individual storyteller, but allows for a dialogic interaction where different perspectives are represented and shape the collective story (Hansen et al., 2007)

In organizations, dialogue reflects a collective inquiry that brings together assumptions and perspectives from different functions within the organization (Isaacs, 1993). This exchange of perspectives across contested views of reality is critical for organizational attention (Barge & Oliver, 2003) and requires credibility and trust (Sellnow & Sellnow, 2010). Thus, dialogue implies a collective process through which the organization learns by the open exchange of ideas and perspectives among its members (Barge & Oliver, 2003; Isaacs, 1993; Scott et al., 2013; Sellnow & Sellnow, 2010), and this helps organizations pay attention to relevant issues and answers. This engagement in collective meaning making promotes organizational attention to the critical issues at the organizational level and may improve information allocation across functions.

Information allocation and dialogue are communication activities that cannot be determined and planned beforehand and are necessarily spontaneous. These practices can be facilitated and nurtured, but not mandated. Because these activities are voluntary, they may be inhibited by organizational members’ natural myopic tendencies. Three myopic tendencies in organizations are ignoring the long term, ignoring the larger picture, and overlooking the risk of failures (Levinthal & March, 1993), and will be discussed next.

Myopia as Organizational Inattention

Levinthal and March (1993) suggest that organizations have three myopic tendencies: ignoring the long term, ignoring the larger picture, and overlooking the risk of failures. These three myopic tendencies represent organizational inattention. This section describes each of the three myopic tendencies as they reflect a lack of organizational attention.

Ignoring the Long Term

The tendency to ignore the long run reflects inattention to current issues that leads to simplifications of contextual demands based on past and current environments (Levinthal & March, 1993). Myopia toward the short term happens because organizations simplify their environments and develop capabilities that may not work if those environments change (Sato, 2012). This focus on the short term has been considered as managerial myopia that starts affecting performance in the midterm (Brauer, 2013). Taking an economic perspective, Brauer (2013) notes that corporations that enjoy higher short-term gains than their industry then have been associated with lower returns the following 3 years. Thus, a focus on the short term has been considered as detrimental to organizations in the midterm and long term.

Information allocation is constrained by a short-term myopic orientation because it depends on the perceived costs and benefits of communicating information. Information allocation implies a cost in time and other resources (Goodman & Darr, 1998) and the benefits of allocating information may not be clear in the short term (Perlow, 1997). Accordingly, organizational members focusing on the short term may be less likely to communicate information that is not related to their immediate task requirements (Levinthal & March, 1993; Perlow, 1997).

Ignoring the Big Picture

Attention requires organizational members to “see the big picture” and to focus on the forest as well as the trees (Senge, 1990). However, most organizational members focus their attention on issues that are close to their everyday activities in both time and space (Levinthal & March, 1993; March, 1991; Rice, 2008). Organizational members tend to focus on certain areas while neglecting others (Chua, 2013). A lack of understanding of the relationships between localized action and the larger picture leads to what Rice (2008) calls “(non)sensemaking” (p. 1), where the focus on local routines may lead to ineffectiveness at the organizational level. Specifically, individual organizational members’ focus on their subunit goals may lead to conflict in goals across organizational subunits (Rice, 2008; Senge, 1990). Unfortunately, as Rice (2008) notes, individuals focusing on their localized functional or departmental goals have few incentives to concern themselves with organizational goals. There are few incentives for individuals to engage in activities such as information allocation and dialogue that may promote attention at the larger level. Information allocation and dialogue have a recursive relationship with organizational attention because they foster attention to the larger picture but are also constrained by a lack of attention to the larger picture.

Information allocation is a voluntary communication process that is inhibited when organizational members ignore the larger picture because it does not lead to individual benefits to organizational members (Goodman & Darr, 1998). Similarly, meetings and members’ interactions could be a site for dialogue, yet are usually perceived as inefficient throughout organizations (Schwartzman, 1986). Avoiding meetings in order to be more productive inhibits shared understanding and organizational attention (Perlow, 1997). Even when meetings take place, dialogic communication in those meetings may be replaced by more succinct and directive communication about urgent issues (Sellnow & Sellnow, 2010). Just as communication may focus on the here and now, excluding long term and systemic issues, communication is also likely to exclude incidents that did not lead to negative consequences. The next section describes this third form of myopia, where incidents and mistakes are corrected but not discussed.

Overlooking the Risk of Failures

Levinthal and March (1993) suggest that past successes lead organizations to underestimate the risk of failure and to attribute any setback to issues out of the control of the organization. Organizational members tend to ignore incidents that happened on the way to success because these incidents had no negative consequences. According to the National Transportation Safety Board’s (2001) Code of Federal Regulations (49CFR830.2), an incident is “an occurrence other than an accident, which affects or could affect the safety of operations” (p. 1195). Incidents need to be reported and reflected upon in order for any type of organization to learn (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). Without the consideration of these incidents, organizational members enact incomplete or inaccurate environments. However, incidents that do not lead to negative outcomes for organizations may be ignored as successes are celebrated (Levinthal & March, 1993). In other words, those “we got lucky” moments tend to be forgotten as milestones and goals are achieved. Tompkins (2005) illustrates how National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) past successes and the managerial orientation toward efficiency led to ignoring the incidents—managers not listening to those having critical information about the need to stop the launch of the Columbia space shuttle, that eventually led to the tragedy. In Tompkins’s (2005) view, prior successes led managers to overlook the risks of the mission, avoid disconfirming information, and this led to the Columbia tragedy. Overlooking incidents imply that organizational members do not engage in reflexive dialogue or allocate information about these incidents.

These three forms of organizational myopia—focusing on the here, focusing on the now, and ignoring mistakes—inhibit organizational attention. Attention at the organizational level requires communicating issues that are not immediate in time and space, as well as communicating incidents that may have seemed irrelevant but could be crucial learning experiences. It thus becomes critical to identify communication interventions that may reduce these myopic tendencies and promote coordinated attention in organizations. The next sections introduce specific communication interventions to nurture organizational attention.

Communication Interventions to Enhance Organizational Attention

Organizational interventions such as workshops and meetings may help organizations nurture collective attention. For example, helping participants develop a systemic view of their organization, expand their time horizons, and realize that their present actions or inactions have a cumulative influence in their organization over time can reduce the myopic tendency to ignore the larger picture (Meadows, 2008). This systemic perspective can also be nurtured through facilitating dialogic coordination (Baraldi, 2013). Baraldi (2013) suggests that facilitating participative decision making enhances clarification of other’s perspectives and promotes reflexivity. In this sense, one counterintuitive form of facilitating a systemic perspective and reducing temporal myopia is for leaders to let go of their power positions during participative decision making (Baraldi, 2013) and engage in dialogic leadership where leaders are not expected to have all the answers (Drath, McCauley, Palus, et al., 2008) and where leadership is seen as a process of relationships engaged in coconstruction of reality rather than an individual person in charge (Uhl-Bien, 2006). By withholding their own opinions until later in their interactions, leaders can then learn from the perspectives of others and cocreate with them a larger picture of the organization.

Dialogic communication interventions are not constrained to face-to-face interactions. Some form of dialogue and perspective taking can also be promoted online or in written form. For example, Tompkins (2005) notes that NASA used to have communication practices that highlighted the importance of redundancy in communication in order to ensure safety. One of the practices described by Tompkins, the Monday notes, reflects a form of dialogue shared in written form across organizational functions every week. This practice of comparing notes thus allows organizational members even in geographically dispersed locations to engage in dialogue that may reduce myopias and nurture organizational attention.

Collective Storytelling

Collective storytelling can trigger dialogic interactions to promote organizational attention. Morgan and Dennehy (1997) note that stories are a great way to communicate the organizational culture because they are easily remembered, are vivid, and relate to organizational members’ own experience. One potential intervention through the use of stories is helping organizational members develop a desirable story about the past and future of the organization and building upon positive aspects of the organization (Rosile, Boje, Carlon, Downs, & Saylors, 2013). Rosile et al. (2013) consider the storytelling process by organizational members under a materialist practice and warn about taking a managerial approach and controlling the narrative. Thus, the main benefit of organizational storytelling should be how it enables organizational sensemaking (Kopp, Nikolovska, Desiderio, & Guterman, 2011).

As discussed before, when there is not one person controlling the process, all the participants own the story and it becomes a collective story (Hansen et al., 2007). It is thus important for the facilitator to not dominate the story development process and to allow participants to develop a rich story drawing on multiple perspectives. The development of these stories can influence the future of the organization (Baruch, 2009). Ideally, the storytelling process to cocreate the future of the organization would follow what Kopp et al. (2011) call “epic stories” (p. 381)—stories that are rich in imagery and fulfill organizational members’ need. Furthermore, the development of these stories would promote prospective sensemaking (Boje & Gomez, 2008) of desired futures. The engagement in storytelling develops a dialogue that allows organizational members to see the desired rich picture and fosters information allocation among members.

After-Action Reviews

After-action reviews (AARs) are a form of formal dialogic communication interventions proposed by organizational learning scholars (e.g., Lipshitz, Friedman, & Popper, 2007) to help increase organizational attention to issues that are otherwise overlooked. Ron, Lipshitz, and Popper (2006) suggest implementing AARs—“a multilayered process of retrospective sensemaking, the detection and correction of error, social comparison, social control, and bonding” (pp. 1083-1084). In Ron et al.’s (2006) study, AARs after every flight mission allowed F-16 fighter squadrons to communicate intent (goals) at the higher level, learn from each other, and improve both individual and collective performance. Although engaging in dialogue about successful missions may not be efficient because they take time, these dialogues may have helped avoid tragic accidents like the shuttle disasters. AARs need to be formally rewarded and promoted because time availability and the pressure for productivity inhibit the engagement in AARs (Allen, Baran, & Scott, 2010). Furthermore, in order for organizational members to contribute to dialogue they need to have trust (Sellnow & Sellnow, 2010) and feel safe discussing potentially opposing views (Isaacs, 1993; Scott et al., 2013). Accordingly, AARs are another example of how formalized communication interventions need to further promote voluntary communication to promote dialogue about risks that may be overlooked.

Implementing interventions such as storytelling, AARs and other mechanisms to promote dialogue may help organizational members pay attention and correct incidents that happened on the way to successes. Because overlooking the risk of failure constrains correcting potential mistakes or limitations of current processes to improve them for the future, this myopia is also related to ignoring the long run. Given the immediate benefits perceived in present actions (Levinthal & March, 1993), focusing on the long term may prove even more challenging than adopting a systemic perspective, facilitating storytelling, or reviewing critical incidents through AARs.

Promoting Attention Through a Long-Term Focus

AARs and storytelling are performed in time and space; these dialogic interactions require organizational members to disengage from their day-to-day routines in order to engage in dialogue about the long run (Barge, 2004). For example, the day-to-day emergencies may force organizations to reschedule their meetings or other forms of dialogue, even though those instances may actually require higher engagement in dialogue. When organizational members focus on the day-to-day routines, they engage less in dialogue.

A focus on the long term and trying to reduce short-term biases depends on how organizational members experience and relate to time. Noting the relevance of communication in how organizational members orient to time, Ballard and Seibold (2003) define temporal perspective as “whether members’ thoughts are oriented toward the present or future” (p. 389). Ballard and Seibold (2006) find support for a positive relation between a future perspective and interdepartmental communication. Their findings indicate that a higher orientation of organizational members toward the long term is related to higher satisfaction with interdepartmental communication. Similarly, Gómez (2009) finds that organizational members with a long-term orientation are more likely to invest in the development of newcomers as organizational members. Further support for the importance a long-term focus to organizations is reflected by Joireman, Daniels, George-Falvy, and Kamdar’s (2006) finding that organizational citizenship behaviors are related to organizational members’ perceiving having a long-time horizon with the organization and to a high score on the consideration of future consequences scale. Long-term orientation is critical for citizenship communication behaviors such as information allocation and dialogue and these behaviors promote organizational attention. In order to strengthen the relevance of a long-term orientation to information allocation and dialogue, the relationship between a long-term orientation and these two communication practices is empirically explored.

Hypothesis 1: Organizational members’ long-term orientation is positively related to their engagement in information allocation.

Hypothesis 2: Organizational members’ long-term orientation is positively related to their engagement in dialogue.

Methodology

Two sites were recruited for this research. The first is a high-technology organization in the Southwest United States. The second site is a public organization in charge of planning and operating public transportation in a city in the Southwest United States. In order to assess whether the sites could be aggregated, a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) using the research site as the fixed factor and long-term focus, information allocation, and dialogue as dependent variables tested for differences across sites. The results from the MANOVA did not show significant differences in responses between research sites and the responses from both sites were aggregated to include 230 participants in the study.

Research Sites

The study relied on two organizations. The first site was a high-technology company based in the Southwest United States. The study was conducted through a web-based survey questionnaire. Data collection through the web-based questionnaire took place in the months of October through December 2006. Following Dillman (2000), three electronic reminders were sent to participants. Each reminder was sent 2 weeks apart, beginning 2 weeks after the initial contact.

Responses were obtained from 58 of the 230 organizational members, reflecting a response rate of 25%. Among the 58 employees, 26 reported to be in a sales division (69% of total respondents), 10 reported to work as engineers (17% of total respondents), 4 reported being in the corporate office (7% of total respondents), and the rest reported being on information technology or consulting. The respondents varied in age from 22 to 53 years, with a mean of 38 years and a standard deviation of 8.19 years. Finally, 41 of the respondents were male (71%), 16 were women (27 %), and 1 did not provide this answer (2%).

The second site for this study is a metropolitan transportation authority (MTA) with approximately 1,200 employees. This MTA is located in the Southwest. Because operations crews did not have their own workstation with Internet access to participate in the online survey, MTA’s information technology staff became involved in implementing public workstations where the operations crew could access the questionnaire. Responses were obtained from 186 of the 1,200 organizational members, reflecting a response rate of 15%, which is in part due to the technological infrastructure limitations of the operations employees. Among the 186 employees, 67 reported they work in an administrative area (37% of the sample and 28% of the 240 administrative employees), 72 (39% of the sample and 8% of the 950 operation employees) reported to be involved in an operations area (including bus drivers, maintenance crews, supervisors, managers, and receptionists), and the other 44 (24% of the sample) did not answer this question.

Results from the MANOVA did not show significant differences between administrative and operations personnel across future temporal perspective, information allocation, and dialogue. Regarding tenure at the company, respondents ranged from 1 month to 26 years, with a mean of 8.48 years and a standard deviation of 7.28 years. Finally, 82 of the respondents were male (45%), 68 were women (37%), and 33 did not respond (18%). A MANOVA model to test for differences between men and women across all the variables found no significant differences. Similarly, tenure was included in the regression model to assess whether it influenced any of the variables and was found to be nonsignificant.

Measures

The measure of long-term orientation was Ballard and Seibold’s (2004) future perspective six-item scale. The items in this scale are introduced with the following statement:

Please think about the way you and your coworkers refer to time in the course of carrying out your daily tasks at work. Read the statements below and then rate each of the words or phrases that follow based upon how well they describe the way you and others in your immediate work group or work unit generally talk about time. Please circle the number to the right of each word or phrase that best represents your answer.

A sample item drawn from Ballard and Seibold (2004) is “In my organization, we usually discuss our work in terms of the future developments.” Consistent with Ballard and Seibold’s study, the reliability of this scale is α = .93. All the scales used in this study are presented in the appendix.

The eight-item scale to measure information allocation was developed for this study drawing from Bock, Zmud, Kim, and Lee (2005), from Kolekofski and Heminger’s (2003) research on information sharing, and from Kramer, Callister, and Turban’s (1995) measure of unrequested information giving. The reliability for the eight-item information allocation scale was α = .92.

The eight-item scale for dialogue was developed drawing from Tjosvold, Tang, and West’s (2004) reflexivity scale. A sample item of this scale is “In this organization we often review our approach to getting the job done.” As with all measures in the study, participants were asked to rate on a 6-point Likert-type scale (1 = strongly disagree, 6 = strongly agree) their level of agreement with the statements in each of the nine items. The reliability of this scale is α = .87.

Analysis

Two regression models were developed. The first model used information allocation as the dependent variable and long-term orientation as the predictor variable. The second model used dialogue as the dependent variable and long-term orientation as the predictor variable.

Hypothesis 1 proposes a positive relationship between organizational members’ long-term orientation and information allocation. This hypothesis is supported (β = .148, p < .05). Similarly, Hypothesis 2 tests for a positive relationship between organizational members’ long-term orientation and dialogue. This hypothesis is also supported (β = .598, p < .001).

The empirical support for the relationship between long-term orientations and communication practices that promote organizational attention implies that organizational interventions such as storytelling and AARs may not foster organizational attention if organizational members are not buffered from short-term demands. A long-term orientation may create a virtuous cycle because dialogue may further enhance a long-term focus and information allocation may foster reciprocity norms. However, the engagement in organizational interventions such as AARs and storytelling sessions require the temporal resources and support from organizational leaders. Buffering organizational members to avoid dialogic communication activities becoming workload issues may go a long way in reaping the benefits of these and any other organizational communication interventions.

Discussion and Limitations

The two main premises in this article are that organizational attention is based on communication behaviors, and can be enhanced through communication interventions. A potential limitation of the article is that the relationship between communication practices and organizational attention is not directly tested, but developed based on prior research. Further research could test whether engaging in information allocation and dialogue is as critical as prior research indicates they are to organizational attention. Nevertheless, the idea that attention at the collective level necessarily requires both the coconstruction of organizational reality (Jian, 2007) and the altruistic allocation of information (Huber, 2004) are consistent with the view of organizations as constituted through communication (McPhee & Zaug, 2000).

Another potential limitation is that the organizational communication interventions are also not tested directly. The inference about communication interventions promoting organizational attention relies primarily on prior research in dialogic interventions such as AARs and storytelling. Nevertheless, research on storytelling has consistently discussed how it fundamentally benefits collective sensemaking (e.g., Kopp et al., 2011), which is critical to dialogue and organizational attention. Similarly, AARs constitute an established field of research and the findings have been consistent in terms of the benefits to organizational teams by fostering attention to critical incidents, and as a form of creating relationships (Lipshitz et al., 2007) that can lead to information allocation.

A final limitation is the lack of a specific organizational intervention that could reliably promote a long-term orientation among organizational members. The concept of retrospective sensemaking through storytelling (Boje & Gomez, 2008) presents a potential opportunity in this regard. Research supporting the positive relationship between a long-term orientation and behaviors that benefit organizations abound (e.g., Ballard, & Seibold, 2006; Gómez, 2009; Joireman et al., 2006). Furthermore, this article includes an empirical test that supports a relationship between a long-term orientation and two communication practices advanced as critical to organization attention—information allocation and dialogue. A critical next step is thus to develop a methodology to explore how to facilitate organizational communication interventions, potentially through prospective storytelling or other dialogic interactions, that could help organizational members develop long-term orientations.

Implications for Practice

Practitioners can benefit organizations by facilitating dialogic interventions that allow organizational members to reduce myopic tendencies and increase collective attention. For example, practitioners can facilitate participatory decision making through dialogic coordination (Baraldi, 2013). Similarly, facilitating the engagement in dialogic leadership where leaders are not expected to have all the answers (Drath et al., 2008) can also reduce myopias by enhancing the discussion of different perspectives and promoting a large picture view of organizational issues. Organizations can also leverage communication technology to create a dialogic space of sharing by modeling NASA’s Monday notes practice depicted in Tompkins (2005).

Practitioners can also facilitate organizational members’ engagement in AARs and storytelling processes, which foster the collective dialogue and increase organizational attention. Although the issue of promoting a long-term orientation is challenging, the article presents empirical evidence indicating that a long-term orientation is positively related to information allocation and dialogue. A long-term orientation cannot be mandated or formally implemented. Nevertheless, following Ballard and Seibold’s (2006) findings, managers can influence the feedback cycles of organizational activities in order to promote a long-term orientation by scheduling frequent AARs, storytelling meetings, and other sites for dialogue to discuss long-term goals of their organizations.

Conclusion

The main premises throughout this article are that (a) organizational attention is based on communication and relies on both information allocation and dialogue and (b) communication interventions can nurture these communication practices critical for organizational attention. Drawing on Ocasio’s (1997) view of organizational attention, two specific communication practices that enable and are enabled by organizational attention are identified: information allocation and dialogue. These communication practices are inhibited by Levinthal and March’s (1993) organizational myopias: ignoring the long run, ignoring the larger picture, and overlooking the risk of failure. Nevertheless, the use of communication interventions such as AARs, storytelling, and other sites for dialogue, and promoting a long-term orientation can reduce these myopias and promote organizational attention.

Footnotes

Appendix

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Luis Felipe Gómez is an assistant professor in the department of communication studies at San José State University, CA, USA.

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