Scholars have recently begun examining the effect of executives’ strategic attention on firm performance by measuring their strategic attention breadth, which is the number of strategic issues executives are attentive to. While this has led to some interesting insights, this measure only reveals how many, and not what strategic issues executives focus on. Departing from the notion that emphasis on any strategic issue has an equivalent effect on the firm, we propose a complementary measure that captures the different patterns of executives’ attention to various strategic issues. Given that strategic actions are an outcome of executives’ focus of attention, we contend that the addition of a measure that identifies the specific issues executives focus on will explain more variance in firm performance than strategic attention breadth alone. Using CEO comments made during earnings calls between 2007 and 2019, we identify 5 strategic attention profiles through a latent profile analysis. We then test the differential effect each strategic attention profile has on the firm to note if an emphasis on specific issues or patterns is beneficial. These insights help CEOs in altering their strategic attention for better performance.
