Towards an Attentional Capacity Model of Strategic Agenda Size : A Multi-Method Study in the Private Banking Industry

We examine whether and when executives' attentional capacity imposes
limits to the number of strategic issues on their agenda. Based on a multi-method study of 79 private banks in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria, Singapore, and Hong Kong that face a broad range of issues in the regulatory, economic, and technological domains, we find that executives are able to attend to multiple issues simultaneously, but that their attentional capacity relates to the nature of the issue context. Issues
tend to interact with each other and the more pervasive issues tend to consume more attentional capacity crowding out other issues. Moreover, the strategic agenda size shapes the richness of organizational change actions. Contributions are intended to be made to selective attention and strategic issue management research by theorizing the role of simultaneous issue processing and of the limits of attention.