Who sits at the table? LinkedIn exposure shapes managers’ situated attention and strategic preferences

The Attention-Based View emphasizes that the social and material features of managerial situations have a crucial impact on the prioritization of issues and on how decision-makers select strategic answers to resolve these issues. This involves communication channels that guide the availability and salience of information in particular situations. One key situational feature of today’s organizations is social media. Social media such as LinkedIn has a profound strategic impact on firms and increasingly shapes the context of strategy work. Yet, we still know little about how it affects individual managers and their situated attention. We conducted a preregistered experiment (N = 138) that simulated managerial LinkedIn use, as well as qualitative interviews (N = 18) with managers. We observed that the exposure to LinkedIn significantly influenced participants’ strategic preferences. This effect remained stable when controlling for individual factors such as experience with strategy work and LinkedIn use, yet it strongly increased for senior-level managers, rendering these influences particularly meaningful for firm-level outcomes. Qualitative evidence suggests that this effect is due to the material reconfiguration of situated managerial attention driven by (1) the ubiquity of communication channels, (2) the consequential expansion of attentional boundaries, and (3) salience through emerging attention regulators. Together, our quantitative and qualitative findings advance the ABV by theorizing how LinkedIn materially reconfigures situated attention in today’s strategy work.