The impact of CEO successor origins on strategic change : the role of the top management team faultline and CEO power

Corporate strategic change needs to be initiated and supported by corporate leaders. When change is difficult due to path dependency and organizational structure impediments, firms may rely on CEO turnover to inspire strategic change. Extant research offers mixed results on how different origin of CEO successors affect strategic change. Based on the upper echelons theory and demographic faultline theory, this dissertation introduces the top management team (TMT) faultline as a mediator to analyze the mechanism and path of how different CEO successors, especially the external CEOs, influence strategic decisions through TMT faultline in the scenario of CEO turnover and explore the moderating effect of CEO power as an important contextual factor.