Changing of the Guard: the Influence of CEO Socialization on Strategic Change
运用社会化理论，分析CEO继任后哪些因素会推动或阻碍企业战略方向改变，帮助理解继任者出身（内部/外部）之外更深层的影响机制。
This paper utilizes socialization theory to describe why some chief executive successions lead to a change in a firm's strategic direction and others do not. We argue that socialization theory permits the identification of a constellation of individual and situational characteristics that can drive or restrain strategic change following succession. Specifically, we develop a framework of how differences in chief executives' prior work experience, educational background, personal characteristics, and differences in the role's requirements and socialization agents' characteristics, can all serve as forces driving or restraining the likelihood of strategic change. This perspective goes beyond the distinction between a successor's origin as an organizational insider or outsider used in previous research to explain the strategic implication of chief executive succession. It provides a description of an underlying process – socialization – that constitutes a theoretical rationale for the link between executive successions and strategic outcomes.