How Situated Attentions Affect the Choices of Professional Service Managers in the Transition to Hybrid Work Arrangements

Abstract

This article explores how top and middle managers in geographically fragmented professional service organizations made decisions about hybrid work arrangements, following COVID-19 (and the end of mandatory working from home). The article reports a single case study of a regional banking corporation in a period when leaders across the organization had to choose between consolidating change or returning to pre-pandemic practices. By applying the concept of situated attention from attentionbased view-theory, the article explores what managers in different contexts are attentive to through a potentially disruptive period. Managers’ attention capacity is limited and the issues and answers they allocate their attention to in the immediate chaotic period following a disruptive change in the organizational environment is important to our understanding of future solutions. Various management issues and answers are identified, and the analysis explores how these are formed by contingent considerations and pressures across the diverging micro-contexts of the single managers. The article provides a model of contextualized management types as they relate to different contexts in a regional/rural organizational environment.