Adapted from “Managing with Style? Micro-Evidence on the Allocation of Managerial Attention” by Wouter Dessein of Columbia Business School, Desmond (Ho-Fu) Lo of Santa Clara University, Francisco Brahm of London Business School, and Chieko Minami of Kobe University.
The paper from Columbia Business School, “Managing with Style? Micro-Evidence on the Allocation of Managerial Attention,” examines how task expertise impacts the allocation of managerial attention and the mitigating impact of stress.
The paper was co-authored by Desmond (Ho-Fu) Lo of Santa Clara University, Francisco Brahm of London Business School, Wouter Dessein of Columbia Business School, and Chieko Minami of Kobe University.
Key Takeaways
- Management style is much more than a way of working. It reflects the discernible patterns that managers adopt to address the complexity of tasks and workflows based on their background and experience. These patterns result in distinct decision-making trends that have far-reaching impacts on organizations.
- The foundation of managerial style is a manager’s capacity for immediate attention, which may be restricted due to cognitive limitations created by stress. Stress may inspire a preference for tasks and strategies aligning with an executive's established expertise, thereby limiting new learnings in unfamiliar situations and the performance of managers faced with new challenges requiring a mix of new and familiar skills.
- Managers’ cognitive bandwidth fluctuates based on stressors like work atmosphere, personal life, and family obligations. With less stress, managers often experience an "attention abundance," shifting focus to new tasks, learning, and innovation. This emphasizes the critical role of stress in influencing managers' performance as they rapidly integrate new skills and information.
Research
The research highlights the influence of managerial cognitive limitations, often triggered by stress, on their actions and choices. These cognitive barriers to rational thinking often manifest in the tendency of managers to gravitate toward tasks that fall within areas where they hold previous experience and expertise.
The research reveals that the factors affecting managers’ focus are often more multifaceted than urgency in a task or a challenging sales quota. Studies of managers in Chile and Japan, for example, show that elements such as work hours, effort intensity and allocation, time pressure, and product demand unpredictability compound personal and external stressors that can cause managers to retreat to more familiar areas of experience and expertise.
Conversely, when managers experience less stress, an abundance of available attention leads to an openness to new areas of learning and innovation—specifically for new methods of achieving performance goals. These findings suggest that organizations should consider the complexity of the impacts of stress on managerial attention when designing workflows, developing new job structures or hierarchies, and creating performance benchmarks.
Conclusion
Organizations should acknowledge the fluid nature of a manager's cognitive abilities. Understanding that these capacities aren't rigid and can differ within a manager over a period and amongst various managers is essential for organizations seeking to optimize workers’ strengths and drive better performance.
As workflow designs help distribute managerial attention uniformly across diverse tasks and strategies, organizations can mitigate managers' excessive concentration on areas where they feel most comfortable but do not require immediate attention.
Being mindful of the importance of internal and external stress in decision-making tasks helps organizations support managers in creating a consistently adaptable problem-solving approach. During recruitment periods, the emphasis should be on more than just the overarching expertise of prospective hires. It is equally important to gauge potential employees’ proficiency across varied tasks and domains when faced with stressful or unexpected challenges.
