Seminar (Dept. of General Management)

Theme：Who will board a sinking ship? A firm-director interdependence perspective of mutual selection between declining firms and director candidates

Speaker：Jun Xia（University of Texas at Dallas）

Time：2021-10-14 10:00

Address：Tencent Meeting

Language：Chinese/English

Venue：Tencent Meeting 

https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/UcXr7tUMjTeC

Meeting ID：804 745 472

Password：1014

ABSTRACT：

We develop a firm–director interdependence perspective to theorize director appointments as the outcome of a mutual selection process in which firms and director candidates select each other based on their organizational and personal dependencies. We apply this perspective to address a puzzle regarding director appointment in declining firms: Declining firms are often motivated to bring in director candidates with high resource endowments to help enact turnarounds, but these candidates may not join a declining firm’s board due to the potential uncertainties and reputational loss of doing so. Drawing on the firm–director interdependence perspective, we predict that director candidates’ social capital and human capital have inverted U-shaped effects on their likelihood of joining a declining firm. Moreover, the declining firm’s organizational social capital differently moderates the effects of candidates’ social capital and human capital. Evidence from a sample of public firms under special treatment (*ST) in China supports our theoretical predictions. 

Source: Jiang, H., Xia, J., Devers, C., and Shen, W. 2021. Who will board a sinking ship? A firm-director interdependence perspective of mutual selection between declining firms and director candidates. Academy of Management Journal. 64(3): 901-925).

SHORT BIOGRAPHY：

Jun Xia is a professor in management and strategy at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests include resource dependence and power, institutional theory, social networks, and corporate strategies. His work has been published in or accepted by the Strategic Management Journal, Academy Journal of Management, Organization Science, and Organizational Research Methods. He is an incoming Senior Editor of Management and Organization Review and a review board member of AMR and JIBS.