The Attention-Directing Ability of Teams

Why do some teams consistently mobilize collective effort and achieve superior performance while others struggle to coordinate action? We introduce Attention-Directing Ability (ADA), a latent team capability capturing how effectively members' interaction signals elicit engagement and coordinated responses from others. Extending the attention-based view, we conceptualize attention direction as an emergent coordination capability embedded in patterns of interaction rather than as a cognitive state or an outcome. Teams differ in the extent to which attention-directing signals trigger collective responses, and these differences shape how teams mobilize effort and perform. We examine ADA in a distributed innovation effort involving 2,233 participants collaborating asynchronously in 79 self-organized teams across 165 public Slack channels, generating over 30,000 messages. We model the causal responsiveness among interaction signals and derive a latent measure of ADA from teams' attention dynamics. We find that ADA strongly predicts both teams' likelihood of mobilizing engagement to sustain collective work and their performance conditional on participation. Correcting for self-selection into project submission, teams with higher ADA are more likely to submit proposals and achieve higher expert-evaluated outcomes. Causal mediation analyses show that these effects operate primarily through collective effort, indicating that attention direction functions as an upstream coordination capability. By conceptualizing attention as an emergent, measurable team capability, this study advances theories of collective attention and team coordination.