CEO succession and the CEO’s commitment to the status quo

Chief executive officer (CEO) commitment to the status quo (CSQ) is expected to play an important role in any firm’s strategic adaptation. CSQ is used often as an explanation for strategic change occurring after CEO succession: new CEOs are expected to reveal a lower CSQ than established CEOs. Although widely accepted in the literature, this relationship remains imputed but unobserved. We address this research gap and analyze whether new CEOs reveal lower CSQ than established CEOs. By analyzing the letters to the shareholders of German HDAX firms, we find empirical support for our hypothesis of a lower CSQ of newly appointed CEOs compared to established CEOs. However, our detailed analyses provide a differentiated picture. We find support for a lower CSQ of successors after a forced CEO turnover compared to successors after a voluntary turnover, which indicates an influence of the mandate for change on the CEO’s CSQ. However, against the widespread assumption, we do not find support for a lower CSQ of outside successors compared to inside successors, which calls for deeper analyses of the insiderness of new CEOs. Further, our supplementary analyses propose a revised tenure effect: the widely assumed relationship of an increase in CSQ when CEO tenure increases might be driven mainly by the event of CEO succession and may not universally and continuously increase over time, pointing to a “window of opportunity” to initiate strategic change shortly after the succession event. By analyzing the relationship between CEO succession and CEO CSQ, our results contribute to the CSQ literature and provide fruitful impulses for the CEO succession literature

Unanswered Questions about Public Service in the Public Research University

Public service in the public research university is more important than ever before, but there is a need to discuss even the most basic questions about the subject. For example, what is meant by service? Who should be served? What methods should be used to evaluate service? What strategies and structures would strengthen service? What is the social responsibility of the university? This article addresses several such questions and some of the issues they raise. It draws on work in diverse fields and recognizes emerging efforts to develop knowledge in ways that serve society.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68673/2/10.1177_088541229100500301.pd

Automatic and controlled processing in sentence recall: The role of long-term and working memory

Immediate serial recall is better for sentences than word lists presumably because of the additional support that meaningful material receives from long-term memory. This may occur automatically, without the involvement of attention, or may require additional attentionally demanding processing. For example, the episodic buffer model (Baddeley, 2000) proposes that the executive component of working memory plays a crucial role in the formation of links between different representational formats and previously unrelated concepts. This controlled integrative encoding may be more important in sentence than word recall. Three experiments examined the effect of an attention-demanding concurrent visual choice reaction time task on the recall of auditorily presented stories, sentences, and lists of unrelated words, in order to investigate the relative importance of automatic and controlled processing for these materials. The concurrent task was found to disrupt the recall of strings of unrelated sentences more than random word lists, suggesting that controlled processing played a greater role in the sentence recall task. On subsequent learning trials, however, recall of the unrelated words was also disrupted by the concurrent task, possibly due to the development of chunking. The large dual task decrement for unrelated sentences did not generalise to the recall of more naturalistic prose, suggesting that the requirement to integrate phonological with long-term linguistic information is not attentionally demanding per se; instead, the integration of unrelated concepts is effortful once recall extends beyond the capacity of the phonological loop. Our results suggest that sentence recall reflects contributions from both automatic linguistic processes and attentionally limited working memory