Adaptive aspirations and performance heterogeneity: Attention allocation among multiple reference points
研究了组织如何在不同参考点（自身期望、自身绩效、竞争对手绩效）间分配注意力，发现组织在生命周期早期和自身或母公司老化时更关注自身期望，濒临破产时则更关注竞争对手绩效。
Organizations learn and adapt their aspiration levels based on reference points (prior aspiration, prior performance, and prior performance of reference groups). The relative attention that organizations allocate to these reference points impacts organizational search and strategic decisions. However, very little research has explored this. Therefore, we build a recursive feedback model of learning from organizational experience that explains heterogeneity of attention allocation to the reference points in adaptive aspirations. In a sample of the German magazine industry (1972–2010), we find when early in their life cycle and as they or their parent company age, organizations tend to focus more on their own aspirations; however, when at the verge of bankruptcy, they increase their attention to competitors' performance . Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.