Organizational Factors That Impact On Public Sector Managers Attention Allocation

What do manager do? This is a basic question in management science, but we still do not have a satisfactory answer to it. In essence, this question is closely related to another one, which is "How manager allocation his/her attention?"Psychologists and economists have focus on the study of managerial attention allocation for a long time. Psychologists' research base on human brain function and most of their findings are about how do personal factors effect attention allocations. Economic analysis has long recognized that attention is a scarce resource, whose allocation follows efficiency principle. While, our research focus is on managerial attention allocation in organizational context.Strictly speaking, the earliest researcher about this question is Fayol. And many people such as Harold koontz and Cyril O'Donnell developed his opinion. But these classical views of modem organizations portray managers as inwardly looking, focusing on intemal activities such as planning, organizing, coordinating, commanding, and controlling. Obviously, Fayol's description about manager's job is of little valid.Mintzberg is one of the earlier researchers that criticized this approach and drew researchers' attention to the use of time and processes of managerial attention allocation in organizations. In a series of Mintzberg's studies, he revealed the behavioral patterns of managerial attention allocation as characteristic of brevity, variety, and discontinuity. And he summarizes managerial activities into ten managerial roles: 3 interpersonal roles (figurehead, leader, and liaison); 3 informational roles (monitor/nerve center, disseminator, and spokesman); 4 decision-making roles (entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator).One of the most famous researchers after Mintzberg is Kotter, whose research echoed Mintzberg's findings. Kotter indicate that managers work long hours, and their time is characteristic of fragmented episodes, and oral communication. Subsequent researches proved their studies conclusions. But these studies are rich in detailed descriptions and contextual analyses.Though, Luthans argued that those managers who pay more-attention to networking are more likely to be "successful', while other managers who pay more attention to communicating and human resource management are more "effective"; and other researchers have pointed that managerial attention allocation influence organizational decision making, policy implementation, organizational roles changing, even William Ocasio explicitly argued that "firm behavior is the result of how firms channel and distribute the attention of their decision makers". But no one give enough attention in rethinking the reason of how does manager allocate his/her attention? Moreover, previous studies usually base on so small investigation sample that their findings are weak in provability. Also, previous studies didn't pay attention to the differences between private management and public management.This article is to reveal the relationship between organizational factors and public managerial attention allocation. To the former, this research conceptualizes organization into six dimensions, including organizational formalization, standardization, complexity, centralization, scale, and power rank. To the latter, we use brevity, variety and managerial time allocafmg on different work aims, including making strategies/decision/planning, supervising/controlling/work implementation, networking, HRM, collecting or exchanging information /learning, handling disturbance, instruction from superiors/work arrangement, other goals, can't remember or does not want to reply.Through real diagnosis research we find that organizational formalization correlates with variety; organizational span of control correlates with brevity; organizational vertical differentiation correlates with variety.