Authors: Zuhur Balayah, Amit Nigam & Charitini Stavropulou
Core puzzle: ABV is a theory of adaptation. This involves organizations implementing innovations that help them adapt. Many adaptive innovations – from the perspective of the situated attention of people working at an operational level – will be distant ideas (i.e. originate far from where they might need to be adopted and used). At the same time, the ABV and its core premises suggest that it would be unlikely for people at an operational level to attend to, let alone implement, distant ideas. .g is developed in the 1997 piece (attention is scarce and situated) – and elaborated on in literature on attentional crowding that shows that attention to structural concerns, financial performance, or a merger can crowd out attention to other substantively important issues (e.g. Yu, Engelman & Van de Ven, 2005; Rerup 2009). Nicolini & Korica’s piece on CEO attentional engagement highlights the challenges of volume, fragmentation & variety. These same challenges experienced at an operational level would work against people attending to and implementing distant ideas (in our case an innovation). Our focus is on issue sellers – people in dedicated roles tasked with advancing an innovation. Empirically, they really struggle with engaging the attention of people at an operational level. The issue sellers are staff in NHS (England) Health Innovation Networks, as well as people in Integrated Care Systems with dedicated roles focused on advancing an innovation.
Research Question: How do issue sellers attempt to capture the situated attention of organizational members working at an operational level?
Findings: Issue sellers perceived that capturing and sustaining the attention of managers working at an operational level was a key challenge. Given this perception, and consistent with prior work on issue selling, they began by attempting to align the distant idea with senior manager’s strategic priorities. In our setting, this meant alignment with the national personalised care strategy. This approach that was seen as helpful for addressing perceived attentional crowding experienced by managers working at an operation level. This approach met with some success. A total of 12 subunits (about a quarter) selected the innovation as a component of their subunit personalised care strategies. However, innovation sellers came to realise that alignment with top-down strategy was not enough to sustain attention. They to perceive a sense of attentional incoherence at an operational level. To address this they moved towards two new practices – aligning with subunit strategies and artefacts and focusing attention on performance feedback.
Contribution: Attentional crowding at operational level is a barrier to strategic adaptation. Structural/communication channels important in dealing with this – form of dedicated issue selling roles – but this is not enough. Consistent with calls for more dynamic view, their issue selling to cope with attentional crowding matters. It changes over time. The second period really is one where attention is stabilised by embedding in operational level practices of attending."
Speaker:
Amit Nigam is a Professor in Management at the Bayes Business School. His research examines the political, sensemaking, and framing processes of organizational and institutional change - with a specific emphasis on professions and occupations in change processes. His work on institutional change looks at the sensemaking, communicative, and career-related processes by which new institutional logics and professions emerge. His work on organizational change focuses on processes of organizational search and learning, on change in organizational routines, and on how peoples’ social positions shape their engagement with the change process. Empirically, he primarily looks at change processes in hospitals and healthcare systems. His research has been published a mix of management, medical sociology, and medical journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Organization, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Social Science & Medicine, Annals of Emergency Medicine, Medical Care Research & Review and BMJ Leader. He is Deputy Editor-in-Chief at BMJ Leader, a journal targeted at clinical leaders in health care with a focus on leadership and management. BMJ Leader aims to bridge management and social science research on leadership with the world of leadership practice in health care in ways that ultimately improve health and care systems. He is also Co-Editor at Strategic Organization.
Link zoom:
https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/98365270887?pwd=At0nr5RVlHOoMlbbCCfHbFKAHaogG5.1
Meeting ID:
983 6527 0887
Passcode:
517001
Lunch at the end of the meeting: for those willing to participate in person, click here before the 13th of November.