Experience maketh the mind? Top management teams’ experiential background and cognitive search for adaptive solutions

The adaptive strategies of firms depend on executives’ forward-looking cognitive search. We examine how cognitive search is affected by the formative experiences of the executives making up a firm’s top management team (TMT). Drawing on research on adaptive search, cognition, and the upper echelons, we examine the extent to which educational level, diversity of functional expertise, and the length of industry tenure of TMT members will be associated with whether cognitive search centers more on proximal or on distal solutions. Analysis of 10 years of panel-data from US companies shows that whereas a TMT’s educational level does not seem to affect cognitive search, diversity of functional expertise does so, as predicted, and industry tenure does so in a manner we had not fully anticipated. Additional analysis also shows that whether cognitive search is proximal or distal is associated with whether firms enter into related or unrelated new product-markets. The article discusses the implications of these findings

Fresh in the saddle: The influence of a new CEO's vision and origin, and CEO succession type on market actors' reactions

CEO succession is a critical event in the life of a company. How external stakeholders respond to it, can affect the company's valuation. This study investigates how securities analysts' and investors' reactions to CEO succession are affected by the interplay between the charisma of the new CEO's vision, the new CEO's origin (whether an insider or outsider), and the type of CEO succession (whether routine, dismissal or interim). Drawing on the literature on signaling, we suggest that because a charismatic vision emits a positive signal about the company's future performance, it will affect market actors' reactions by either weakening or strengthening the influence of the signals emitted by other succession context contingencies, namely, CEO origin and succession type. To test our predictions regarding analysts' and investors' reactions, we respectively analyze panel data and conduct an event study. The results support most of our predictions. We discuss the study's contributions and implications

The organizational environment with its measures, antecedents, and consequences: A review and research agenda

The organizational environment is a focal element of multifaceted managerial decisions. Consequently, research has shown a long lasting and still growing interest in investigating the organizational environment and understanding its impact on a firm. Because it is widely assumed that the business environment will become more dynamic, changes in the organizational environment have drawn the particular attention of many scholars. While the extant research has established valuable knowledge, its fragmentation due to differing definitions and contradictory findings calls for a broad review to establish a foundation for future research. By analyzing 279 studies that have investigated different aspects of the organizational environment between 1958 and mid-2017, we contribute to various research streams that involve this environmental factor. We use a comprehensive research framework to categorize and review the previous work. In particular, we distinguish between studies that define or measure the organizational environment, as well as studies that investigate antecedents, outcomes, and moderating effects of the organizational environments. Among those categories, we discuss our findings, before subsequently synthesizing existing works and deriving an agenda for future research