Seminar (Dept. of General Management)

Theme：Navigating Strategic Change: New CEO’s Substantive and Symbolic Actions and Their Early Survival Prospects

Speaker：Xiwei Yi（Guanghua School of Management, Peking University）

Time：2021-12-28 10:00

Address：Room 1008, Mingde Business Building

Language：Chinese/English

ABSTRACT：

Newly appointed CEOs face a dilemma that they often have a mandate to initiate strategic change but are vulnerable to negative reactions from important constituents. This study examines how strategic change influences new CEOs’ early survival prospects as well as how new CEOs could manage the dilemma and navigate strategic change in their early career. We propose that while new CEOs’ strategic change is positively related to their early dismissal rate, this relationship can be attenuated by the new CEO’s sensegiving, defined as the process that CEOs engage in various social construction actions to shape organizational constituents’ interpretations and thus to secure their acceptance and support to the change. We examine two aspects of the sensegiving process, demonstrating charisma and strategic discourse, and operationalize these two constructs through a computer-aided content analysis utilizing quarterly earnings conference call transcripts. Using the sample of CEO successions of S&P 500 firms during the period from 2002 to 2012, we find support for our predictions. Our study makes important contributions to the CEO succession literature as well as to the strategic change literature.