Organizations tackling societal grand challenges such as poverty, disease and migration encounter distinct attention load problems. Organizational members’ attentional engagement with daily operations might be depleted by their frustration with the overwhelming size of the challenge and by their compassion for huge numbers of help seekers. Our study examines how members’ limited attention is structured to produce continuous achievements at a charitable hospital in India that aspires to provide free high-quality medical care to all people. From it emerges an emotion reconciling process characterized by emotion projecting, whereby members evoke the emotion of hope and imagine that the present unattended demands will be taken care of by other social entities in the future. This works in parallel with emotion fortifying, whereby a small number of gatekeepers help to circumscribe other members’ compassion experiences. Together these practices foster members’ attentional engagement with day-to-day operations and the organization’s continued effectiveness. Our study provides novel insights into the attention-based view of organizations by proposing emotion-based mechanisms that reconcile attention overload when organizations are deluged by the scale of demand as they seek to tackle the world’s grand challenges.
