Failure Escape: The role of advice seeking in CEOs’ awareness of financial difficulties and corporate restructuring
研究法国407家财务困境中小企业中CEO寻求建议的行为，发现其通过提升CEO对财务困难的认知，进而促进企业重组决策，且高管团队职能多样性起调节作用。
This study investigates CEOs’ advice-seeking behavior in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and its influence on managing the financial difficulties these firms face. Grounded in the attention-based view of firms, our framework posits that CEOs’ advice seeking plays a sequential role in shaping a firm’s response to financial distress, by influencing CEOs’ awareness of financial difficulties and, subsequently, the restructuring process. We differentiate between advice sought from formal and informal advisors and consider top management team (TMT) functional diversity as a moderator. We test these hypotheses using a proprietary dataset of 407 financially distressed SMEs in France. Our results indicate that advice seeking significantly enhances CEOs’ decision to proceed to restructuring and this effect is mediated by the heightened financial awareness of CEOs. Furthermore, our research highlights the moderating role of the functional diversity of TMT members in the relationship between advice seeking and the restructuring decision.