The Attention-Directing Ability of Teams

2026-07-28

AI Summary

This study addresses why some teams sustain effective coordination and high performance while others struggle, proposing attention-directing ability (ADA) as an emergent coordination mechanism in team interactions. Moving beyond conceptualizations of attention as an individual cognitive state, the research operationalizes ADA as a measurable team-level construct. Drawing on over 30,000 asynchronous messages from 2,233 members across 79 self-organizing teams on Slack, the authors develop a dynamic measure of ADA using causal response modeling and latent variable estimation. Findings reveal that ADA significantly predicts both the likelihood of teams sustaining collective engagement and expert-rated performance, with these effects primarily mediated through enhanced collective effort. This work advances attention-based theories of organizing by demonstrating how shared attentional dynamics at the team level facilitate coordination and effectiveness.

Abstract

Why do some teams consistently mobilize collective effort and achieve superior performance while others struggle to coordinate action? We introduce Attention-Directing Ability (ADA), a latent team capability capturing how effectively members' interaction signals elicit engagement and coordinated responses from others. Extending the attention-based view, we conceptualize attention direction as an emergent coordination capability embedded in patterns of interaction rather than as a cognitive state or an outcome. Teams differ in the extent to which attention-directing signals trigger collective responses, and these differences shape how teams mobilize effort and perform. We examine ADA in a distributed innovation effort involving 2,233 participants collaborating asynchronously in 79 self-organized teams across 165 public Slack channels, generating over 30,000 messages. We model the causal responsiveness among interaction signals and derive a latent measure of ADA from teams' attention dynamics. We find that ADA strongly predicts both teams' likelihood of mobilizing engagement to sustain collective work and their performance conditional on participation. Correcting for self-selection into project submission, teams with higher ADA are more likely to submit proposals and achieve higher expert-evaluated outcomes. Causal mediation analyses show that these effects operate primarily through collective effort, indicating that attention direction functions as an upstream coordination capability. By conceptualizing attention as an emergent, measurable team capability, this study advances theories of collective attention and team coordination.

Problem

• team coordination
• collective attention
• attention-directing ability
• team performance
• emergent capability

Innovation

• Attention-Directing Ability
• collective attention
• team coordination
• emergent capability
• causal mediation