The Influence Of Top Management Team Attention On Firm Innovation Behavior

In the rapidly changing and highly competitive global market environment,innovation has become the bedrock of the firms' survival and development,and the researchers in academia and managers in firms have also regarded innovation as a critical source of competitive advantages.The top management team,as the maker of firms' strategic decisions and behaviors,has an essential impact on firm innovation.In particular,the psychological and cognitive characteristics of top management team are mental guidelines to make innovation decisions and ultimately affect the firm innovation behavior.The dominant process model of managerial cognition emphasizes the importance of managerial attention for decisions and behaviors of firms and scholars have started to pay attention to the relationship between managerial attention and firm innovation.Based on the upper echelons theory,this paper introduces the concepts of time and space in strategic management to study the influence mechanism of top management team attention on firm innovation behavior.In addition,we focus on the unique effect of situational factors and choose managerial discretion as a moderator to reveal that how top management team attention exerts an influence on firm innovation behavior under certain boundary conditions.This paper selects 228 innovative firms in main-board markets in Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange in China,uses automatic text analysis method to obtain the data and carries out correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis to test the hypotheses.We reach the following conclusions:(1)both the past attention and internal attention of top management team make a negative impact on firm innovation behavior,and all the present attention,future attention and external attention of top management team make a positive impact on firm innovation behavior;(2)the firm age negatively moderates the relationship between present attention of top management team and firm innovation behavior,the relationship between future attention of top management team and firm innovation behavior,the relationship between internal attention of top management team and firm innovation behavior,as well as the relationship between external attention of top management team and firm innovation behavior;(3)the firm size negatively moderates the relationship between present attention of top management team and firm innovation behavior,the relationship between internal attention of top management team and firm innovation behavior,as well as the relationship between external attention of top management team and firm innovation behavior;(4)the ownership of firm negatively moderates the relationship between present attention of top management team and firm innovation behavior,the relationship between future attention of top management team and firm innovation behavior,as well as the relationship between internal attention of top management team and firm innovation behavior.