Tensions in managerial attention in a company in crisis

1. Introduction

When a crisis occurs, nuances of the kind of information managers pay attention to when making strategic and operational decisions can have a profound effect on the company’s chances to survive the crisis (D’Aveni and MacMillan, 1990). Research show that top managers in companies with a crisis that demands that they survive pay more attention to external information, while top managers at companies that go bankrupt pay more attention to the internal environment. Use of Management Accounting Systems (MAS) also seems to change dramatically during the crisis compared to a situation of non-crisis (Ezzamel and Bourn, 1990; Euske et al., 1993; Collings et al., 1997; Lin et al., 2006; Becker et al., 2015). From the perspective of attention to information, the way MAS is used by managers in a situation of crisis can have important implications for the firm’s survival, e.g. integrating managerial attention on different levels toward the common objectives by, for example, tightening organizational controls (Chenhall, 2003; Czarniawska-Joerges, 1988).

However, addressing a crisis by tightening organizational controls may jeopardize agility, flexibility and dynamics (Bogsnes, 2009; Bhimani and Langfield-Smith, 2007). Despite a few studies (Frow et al., 2005), we still know little about how MAS contributes to dealing with both dangers and opportunities related to organizational crisis. Little research has been conducted so far regarding what information managers focus their attention on in organizations under financial distress conditions. Especially, there has been little empirical work on the focus of attention on MAS by managers at different levels.

This article builds on data from a case study of a company, TelCo, that demonstrates how change to a MAS introduced to handle the crisis failed to integrate top and line managers’ attention toward the common issues: a tension in attention. The main research question we address in this article is: RQ1.

How can MAS create tensions in a situation of a crisis in attention to information between top and line managers?

To analyze the data, the attention-based view of the organization (Ocasio, 2011) and the MAS was mobilized as well as organizational psychology literature (Kira and Korpelainen, 2012; Korpelainen and Kira, 2013; White, 2009). First, the attention-based view explains how attention is given to information in organizations (Ocasio,...