CEO entrepreneurial orientation, human resource management systems, and employee innovative behavior: An attention‐based view
基于152家中国企业的多层多源数据，研究发现CEO创业导向通过高绩效工作实践转化为员工创新行为，其中人力资源管理系统的注意力结构起关键中介作用，且HRM战略重要性和部门职能焦点调节该效应。
Abstract Research Summary Chief executive officer (CEO) entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is an emerging topic within entrepreneurship research. This research offers the attention‐based view (ABV), and its principles of attentional focus, situated attention, and structural distribution of attention to explain how CEO EO fosters an innovative organizational workforce. We theorize that CEO EO predicts lower‐level employee innovative behavior when their top managerial attentional focus on entrepreneurship is translated into high‐performance work practices, which structurally distribute their strategic attention throughout the organization and promotes a situated attentional condition for employees emphasizing innovation. Moreover, we consider (a) human‐resource management (HRM) perceived importance and (b) departmental functional foci as boundary conditions. Using a multi‐level and multi‐source sample from 152 Chinese firms, results support our arguments. Managerial Summary Employee innovative behavior is critical to firm growth, renewal, and sustainability. By collecting and analyzing data on 2745 employees nested in 586 departments nested in 152 organizations, we examine the critical role that human resource management (HRM) systems and high‐performance work practices may play in translating a CEOs emphasis on entrepreneurial activity into employee innovative behavior. We offer and observe support for an attention‐based perspective that HRM systems serve as “attentional structures” which channel CEO preferences to lower‐organizational levels. Our results further indicate that an embrace of HRM as a strategic priority among top managers, as well as whether employees are in “boundary spanning” input–output areas of the business, to be meaningful factors which strengthen the effect of HRM‐based attentional structures upon employee innovative behavior.