In the face of extreme volatility, organizations must draw on a vast array of staff to attend to that volatility and manage responses. In short, organizations need to be able to concentrate—to intensely focus and intentionally coordinate their collective attentional resources on a common problem. However, research on organizational attention is insufficient to explain how organizations concentrate. We use a qualitative case study of a US health care organization responding to the COVID-19 pandemic to investigate organizational concentration. We develop a process model of organizational concentration as a rhythmic circuit that oscillates between two phases. During the attentional divergence phase, organizational attention disperses across issues and actors for in-depth, detailed investigation. During the attentional convergence phase, attention coalesces horizontally and vertically across the organization into a relatively unified focus on one or a set of issues. Each phase has differential effects on the quality of attention (i.e., stability, vividness, and coherence). Temporal rhythms of recurring activities, such as meetings, are consequential mechanisms that control oscillations between attentional divergence and attentional convergence, thereby managing organizational concentration and potentially increasing organizational agility. Our study contributes to research on both the attention-based view of the firm and collective mindfulness.
