By mid-morning, a finance director has approved changes to a board presentation, dealt with two urgent requests from senior colleagues and joined a meeting about a reporting problem that nobody seems able to resolve. Meanwhile, a short message from the pricing team is still waiting in her inbox. Claims costs appear to be rising faster than the latest pricing assumptions anticipated. The message has no urgent flag, no executive copied in and no meeting attached to it.
Each of these issues may deserve attention. The presentation, the requests and the reporting meeting all come with people expecting an answer. The pricing concern requires something different: time to examine the figures, understand their implications and decide whether action is needed. For the moment, nobody is waiting outside the director’s office for that decision.
Leaders have always dealt with incomplete information, competing demands and uncertainty. Digital communication has changed how those demands reach them. Information now arrives through multiple channels, accompanied by reminders, comments, meeting invitations and requests for immediate confirmation. A considerable part of the working day can be spent responding to these demands before anyone has compared their relative importance.
William Ocasio’s attention-based view of the firm offers an explanation. In his 1997 work, Ocasio argued that organisational behaviour depends partly on how decision-makers’ attention is distributed. Rules, relationships and communication procedures influence which problems reach particular people and which possible responses they consider. Joseph and colleagues (2024) develop this perspective further, examining how organisational interactions and communication direct managerial attention.
A problem does not have to be particularly serious to become prominent. It may simply have a determined sponsor, a deadline and a place on the management agenda. Another issue may carry greater financial consequences but receive little attention because nobody has yet established its significance or taken responsibility for bringing it forward.
The digital working environment makes this competition harder to manage. Research reviewed by Marsh, Perez Vallejos and Spence (2022) links digital work to technostress and information overload. Cheng, Bao and Zarifis (2020) found that IT-mediated interruptions were associated with emotional exhaustion through interruption overload. The causes extend beyond technology itself. Shahrzadi and colleagues (2024) identify task design, organisational conditions and the characteristics of information among the factors contributing to overload.
Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index offers a contemporary illustration. Among Microsoft 365 users receiving the highest volume of communications, the company’s analysis found meeting, email and chat notifications arriving at intervals averaging approximately two minutes. This figure describes a particularly communication-heavy group, although it gives some indication of the fragmentation experienced in digitally intensive roles.
Many of these interruptions are legitimate. A client problem may require immediate action, and a request from a senior colleague may concern something genuinely important. The difficulty begins when frequency, visibility or persistence increasingly determines which requests receive attention.
Consider what happens to the pricing concern in the opening example. If nobody follows it up, the director may assume that the analyst will investigate further and return with a clearer recommendation. The analyst may assume that sending the information was sufficient to alert management. Both continue with their other responsibilities. The information remains available, although nobody with the authority to act has yet established whether it requires a decision. A warning can remain visible for quite some time without becoming a decision.
The same working environment can also affect how organisational difficulties are explained. When managers struggle with excessive demands, the explanation often turns towards their capacity to cope.
A manager tells HR that she cannot keep up with instructions arriving from several senior colleagues. She is offered a resilience course. The people assigning the work are not asked to reconsider their deadlines.
The manager may genuinely benefit from support. She may be exhausted, find it difficult to concentrate and worry about falling behind. But the demands themselves remain. Her responsibilities still compete for the same hours, and she may have no authority to postpone any of them.
Research on managerial role stress helps explain what such conditions can mean for leadership. Lin and colleagues (2022), studying managers and employees in the hotel industry, found that managerial role stress could undermine empowering leadership and the ability of managers and employees to thrive at work. Their findings draw attention to the consequences of excessive demands and unclear expectations within management roles.
The resilience course is relatively easy to arrange. Resolving the conflict between senior colleagues’ instructions requires them to agree on which work takes precedence. Some deadlines may need to move, and some requests may have to be withdrawn. That conversation is considerably less convenient.
How an organisation describes the problem influences what it is prepared to change.
McDonald and colleagues (2025), in their analysis of positive psychology in workplace practice, examine how psychological approaches can emphasise individual strengths, goals and behavioural adjustment. Their research raises questions about situations in which the responsibility for managing difficult working conditions is directed primarily towards the individual.
Psychological support has a legitimate place in organisations. People experience stress differently, and personal wellbeing deserves attention in its own right. Yet a manager’s distress can also provide information about how the organisation allocates work, sets priorities and distributes authority. Treating the experience without examining those conditions may leave an important part of the problem untouched.
This distinction becomes particularly important when organisational explanations are inconvenient. A delayed project can be described as a lack of ownership, although its manager is waiting for decisions from another department. A team struggling with competing deadlines may be advised to improve its focus, while senior management continues to introduce new priorities. An exhausted leader may be encouraged to develop greater resilience, while the volume of work assigned to the role remains unchanged.
None of these interpretations is necessarily false. Their usefulness depends on whether they explain the conditions producing the observed behaviour. The language used in management discussions can direct attention towards some remedies while making others less likely to be considered.
The same principle applies to the information competing for a leader’s attention. An issue may dominate a meeting because several people are demanding an answer. Another may be mentioned briefly because its consequences are still uncertain. The amount of discussion surrounding either issue tells us surprisingly little about its eventual importance.
For senior leaders, it is worth examining how an issue obtained its place on the agenda. Who decided that it was urgent? What would happen if the response waited until tomorrow? Is the pressure coming from a commercial or operational consequence, or from the number and seniority of the people requesting attention?
Less visible information deserves the same scrutiny. An early warning about margins, customer behaviour, employee turnover or the quality of a hiring decision may arrive without an immediate demand for action. Someone must have the opportunity to examine its significance, and there must be a credible route for bringing the concern to the people who can decide what to do. An unresolved warning needs someone responsible for assessing it, even when no immediate action is required.
The finance director may finish her week having responded promptly to every senior request, attended the necessary meetings and approved the board presentation. The pricing concern may still be waiting for a decision.
Her calendar would provide an accurate account of how she spent her time. It would tell us rather less about whether the organisation gave the right problems the attention they deserved.
References
Cheng, X., Bao, Y., & Zarifis, A. (2020). Investigating the impact of IT-mediated information interruption on emotional exhaustion in the workplace. Information Processing & Management, 57(6), Article 102281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2020.102281
Joseph, J., Laureiro-Martinez, D., Nigam, A., Ocasio, W., & Rerup, C. (2024). Research frontiers on the attention-based view of the firm. Strategic Organization, 22(1), 6–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/14761270231223397
Lin, M., Ling, Q., Zhang, L., Cui, X., & Zhang, Z. (2022). The effects of manager role stress on job thriving of both employees and managers through empowering leadership. Tourism Management, 92, Article 104545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2022.104545
Marsh, E., Perez Vallejos, E., & Spence, A. (2022). The digital workplace and its dark side: An integrative review. Computers in Human Behavior, 128, Article 107118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.107118
McDonald, M., Nguyen, L. T., Bubna-Litic, D., Nguyen, T.-N., & Taylor, G. (2025). Positive psychology applied to the workplace: A Foucauldian discourse analysis. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 65(6), 1048–1073. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678211029400
Microsoft. (2025). 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report: The year the Frontier Firm is born. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/2025-the-year-the-frontier-firm-is-born
Ocasio, W. (1997). Towards an attention-based view of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 18(S1), 187–206.
Shahrzadi, L., Mansouri, A., Alavi, M., & Shabani, A. (2024). Causes, consequences, and strategies to deal with information overload: A scoping review. International Journal of Information Management Data Insights, 4(2), Article 100261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jjimei.2024.100261