Chair of Corporate Management and Change –

Drawing from the family business perspective, this study provides insights into how the heterogeneity arising from founding family structures explains why particular business groups grow extensively, while others faced with similar external market conditions do not, and how the effects of founding family structure change over time. We test our hypotheses by using a unique, hand-collected, and extensive panel dataset which contains information of the full demographic history of founding families and all public and private companies founded/acquired or divested over the 1925-2012 period for 51 business groups in Turkey. Consistent with our hypotheses, our findings show that family size is a major positive determinant of the number of affiliated firms and the group scope. This effect is more strongly driven by sons compared to daughters. Business groups also grow more extensively when the first-born child is male. These family effects are stronger in the early developmental period of the business groups.

When academic researchers, business commentators, and boards of directors have debated the merits of hiring new CEOs from outside the firm, the implicit or explicit assumption typically made is that outsider CEOs will provide an advantage in achieving strategic change. In this study, we challenge this assumption by employing a duality perspective on stability/change, and we provide an original conceptual framework to posit that it is the presence of corporate stability (ordinary succession, a long-tenured predecessor CEO, and good firm performance) that allows outsider CEOs to generate a greater degree of post-succession strategic change. We use extensive longitudinal data from US airline and chemical industries between 1972 and 2010 to test our hypotheses, and we discuss how our supportive findings challenge long-standing assumptions regarding the outsider succession–strategic change relationship, and we advocate embracing the non-intiutive notion that stable (unstable) conditions can be enablers (barriers) of strategic change for outsider CEOs.

On average, CEOs recruited from outside the company perform about the same as those who come up through the ranks, the authors’ research suggests. But there are certain circumstances in which outsider CEOs tend to do better.

This study seeks to reconcile inconsistent findings on the performance consequences of new CEO origin. Drawing on five decades of empirical research on CEO succession outcomes, I develop a more refined theoretical conceptualization and a finer-grained measurement of the underlying construct of the insider vs. outsider CEO, and build and test a more comprehensive and nuanced framework of the succession context. A longitudinal investigation of the U.S. airline and chemical industries (1972–2002) indicates that new CEO ‘Outsiderness’, conceptualized as a continuum raging from new CEOs who have a greater combination of firm and industry tenure to those who have no experience in the firm and the industry, has no main effect on post-succession firm performance. However, significant moderating effects are found when environmental munificence, pre-succession firm performance, and concomitant strategic and senior executive team changes are considered. Together, these findings highlight the need to consider both pre- and post-succession contextual factors for evaluating the performance effects of new CEO outsiderness. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.