Situated Attention and Strategic Leadership Interfaces: The Role of CEO Humility and Digital Transformation Urgency for Corporate Venture Capital Investments

Abstract Integrating the attention‐based view with the strategic leadership interfaces perspective, we propose a theoretical model of situational urgency mechanisms influencing the allocation of CEOs' attention towards responsive actions. Specifically, we theorize upon the role of humility, which leads CEOs towards embracing interfaces and makes them particularly attentive to the situational context in which they operate. We test our theorization by studying corporate venture capital investments in digital ventures as a response to the situational urgency for digital transformation originating from multiple levels of analysis, internal and external to the firm. Testing a sample of 362 CEOs from 191 firms and 35 industries, we find support for the importance of CEO humility and the moderating role of the lack of top management team digital experience (team‐level urgency) and emerging digital competition (industry‐level urgency). Our study provides important insights into CEO responsiveness and advances our understanding of situated attention through the theorization of situational urgency and its integration with the strategic leadership interfaces perspective.