CEOs' Use of Attention Capacity to Set a Comprehensive Agenda: Attention Load and Social Influence

In complex settings, people’s thinking, acting, and interacting with others is often bound by limited attention capacity - limitations to the amount of load that they effectively can bear. In this article, we uncover how decision-makers’ attention load dynamics and their linkages to senders’ influence behaviors provide fertile grounds for reconsidering assumptions surrounding attention capacity limitations. To this end, we synthesize research on constraining – extrinsic - and on enabling – germane - load dynamics, which shape CEOs’ use of attention capacity to develop a comprehensive strategic agenda. Critical to the different ways in which CEOs’ attention load dynamics unfold are social influence behaviors, through which other top managers in general, and Chef Strategy Officers (CSOs) in particular, seek to support or even to control the CEO’s strategic agenda. Together, our arguments expand and to some extent challenge theory on attention capacity and open new opportunities for studying linkages between attention and upward influence behavior in organizations.