The disease of indifference: How relational systems provide the attentional infrastructure for organizational resilience

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Interpersonal relationships among organization members based on trust, disclosure, and mutual respect are an important capability that organizations need to be resilient in times of crisis. Using the attention-based view, we theorize how the attention paid to interpersonal relationships among top managers continually shapes and is shaped by the quality of relationships that emerge at the unit level. We leverage the attention-based view to theorize how different patterns of attention are associated with configurations of structures for building interpersonal relationships, with the resulting patterns of behavior producing distinct relational systems. We contrast three relational system archetypes: relational advocacy, relational antipathy, and what we argue is the most common but least understood and most likely to weaken organizational resilience—relational indifference. These systems are theorized as central to the attentional infrastructure of the organization, impacting its capacity for attentional stability and coherence on emergent issues. The proposed framework offers a novel view of organizational resilience and interpersonal relationships with notable contributions to multiple research domains and to practice.