The Attention Focus Of Top Managers And Innovation Performance

Innovation is a key element for high-tech firms to build and maintain competitive advantage. It’s always thought that the attention focus of top managers have great affects on innovation behavior. However, previous studies have so far had insight into the relationship between attention focus of top managers and innovation performance, and not yet considered the moderating effect from slack resource. Building on the attention-based theory of the firm, therefore, this paper attempts to reveal the impact of attention focus of top managers on innovation performance, and the moderating role of three types of slack resources on this relationship.The major questions of the research are:(1) How does the attention focus of top managers affect innovation performance?(2) How does three types of slack resources moderate the relationship between attention focus of top managers and innovation performance? Choosing120high-tech firms as research samples, this paper implements descriptive statistics, moderation test and simple slope test.The major conclusions of the research are:(1) Both future attention focus and external attention focus of top managers promote innovation performance;(2) Internal attention focus of the top managers inhibit innovation performance;(3) Available slack negatively moderates the relationship between external attention focus and innovation performance as well as the relationship between internal attention focus and innovation performance;(4) Potential slack positively moderates the relationship between external attention focus and innovation performance as well as the relationship between internal attention focus and innovation performance;(5) Recovery slack negatively moderates the relationship between future attention focus and innovation performance, while positively moderates the relationship between external attention focus and innovation performance as well as the relationship between internal attention focus and innovation performance.The result shows that depend on the circumstances of various types of slack, reasonable distribution of top managers’ attention resource in both time and space dimension will promote innovation performance.