TY - JOUR
T1 - COVID‐19 Pandemic: The Interplay Between Firm Disruption and Managerial Attention Focus
AU - Ghobadian, Abby
AU - Han, Tian
AU - Zhang, Xuezhi
AU - O'Regan, Nicholas
AU - Troise, Ciro
AU - Bresciani, Stefano
AU - Narayanan, Vadake
N1 - This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Ghobadian, A., Han, T., Zhang, X., O'Regan, N., Troise, C., Bresciani, S. and Narayanan, V. (2021), COVID-19 Pandemic: The Interplay Between Firm Disruption and Managerial Attention Focus. Brit J Manage, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12556. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
PY - 2022/1
Y1 - 2022/1
N2 - Pandemics and epidemics occur regularly, yet their impact on firm behaviours is under-researched. COVID-19 provides a unique opportunity to examine the impact of a once-in-a-century pandemic – given its scope, swift spread, health and economic devastation – on firms’ behaviours. Attention is the critical and initial step of the environmental adaptation process. In this paper, we draw on two complementary theories – contingency and attention-based view – and examine the relationship between disruption experienced by firms and their COVID-19 attention focus – a sudden exogenous shock. Industry environments may influence which signals attract managerial attention; hence, we examine if firm disruption–COVID-19 attention focus is moderated by industry dynamism. Drawing on the publicly available data and using a sample of 1,861 US and 1,154 Chinese firms – two diametrically opposite situational contexts – we test the generalizability of our hypotheses. We find a positive relationship between firm disruption and COVID-19 attention focus for the US sample and that industry dynamism negatively moderates this relationship. In the case of Chinese firms, these relationships were insignificant. Further analysis using topic modelling revealed that business–government relationships accounted for this difference.
AB - Pandemics and epidemics occur regularly, yet their impact on firm behaviours is under-researched. COVID-19 provides a unique opportunity to examine the impact of a once-in-a-century pandemic – given its scope, swift spread, health and economic devastation – on firms’ behaviours. Attention is the critical and initial step of the environmental adaptation process. In this paper, we draw on two complementary theories – contingency and attention-based view – and examine the relationship between disruption experienced by firms and their COVID-19 attention focus – a sudden exogenous shock. Industry environments may influence which signals attract managerial attention; hence, we examine if firm disruption–COVID-19 attention focus is moderated by industry dynamism. Drawing on the publicly available data and using a sample of 1,861 US and 1,154 Chinese firms – two diametrically opposite situational contexts – we test the generalizability of our hypotheses. We find a positive relationship between firm disruption and COVID-19 attention focus for the US sample and that industry dynamism negatively moderates this relationship. In the case of Chinese firms, these relationships were insignificant. Further analysis using topic modelling revealed that business–government relationships accounted for this difference.
UR - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8551.12556
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85118227958&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/1467-8551.12556
DO - 10.1111/1467-8551.12556
M3 - Article
SN - 1045-3172
VL - 33
SP - 390
EP - 409
JO - British Journal of Management
JF - British Journal of Management
IS - 1
ER -