Triadic Attentional Processing and Buildup of Joint Attentional Engagement in Emergent Strategic Initiatives

The attention-based view (ABV) posits that strategic actions are shaped by the issues members attend to. Seminal theorizing explains top management’s role in distributing and enacting attention, but we know less about how organizational attention emerges through bottom-up strategic initiatives. Whereas traditional ABV adopts a dyadic approach to attending (attendee and object of attention), we introduce a triadic approach (attendee, coattendee, and joint object) to explain the buildup of joint attentional engagement in bottom-up strategic initiatives. Drawing on research on social cognition and social agency, we develop a three-fold process model comprising: (1) brokering and rhetorical work as key forms of triadic agency throughwhich individuals initiate and sustain joint attentional engagement; (2) cognitive alignment and shared trust as mechanisms through which a collectively attending entity and collective attention emerge, enabling a jointly attended issue to develop into a strategic initiative; and (3) attracting and engaging broader organizational attention amid competing issues and initiatives, thereby connecting the emergent strategic initiative to the organization’s broader strategic agenda. By theorizing organizational attention as a joint, emergent, and recursive phenomenon, we advance both ABV and strategy process research, thereby offering a micro-foundational explanation of how bottom-up initiatives gain traction and enable strategic change.