CEO succession within top management teams: A process understanding of the (un)successful emergence and development of high quality collaboration.

In today’s business world, most organizations experience one or more Chief Executive Officer (CEO) successions, i.e., the planned or unplanned replacement of the incumbent leader with a newly appointed CEO. Unfortunately, failed CEO successions remain frequent and expensive for organizations. The aim of this dissertation project is to better understand the underlying dynamics during the entry process and early tenure of newcomer CEOs. Specifically, this research project aims to explore the (un)successful emergence and development of high quality collaboration within top management teams (TMTs) with newly appointed CEOs. Researchers have been stressing that strategic decision-making processes and organizational performances should be considered less as the attributes of a single CEO, but more as a collective process among all members of the TMT. As a result, sound strategic decisions and positive organizational performances can only emerge when within-TMT dynamics reflect high quality collaboration, or a productive way of working within the TMT that helps the team reach its objectives. Drawing on qualitative data from 14 organizations that experienced a change in leadership, we aimed to answer three specific research questions. Specifically, Chapter 2 provides a trajectory-based rationale for answering the research question ‘How does collaboration quality within TMTs with newcomer CEOs develop over time?’. By following a configurational view on collaboration quality dynamics, a taxonomy of multiple trajectories is presented as temporally distinct developmental pathways. To verify and enrich our taxonomy of theoretical trajectories, we used a pattern-matching technique as analytical strategy. Developmental pathways are described as neither random nor boundlessly heterogeneous, but rather as a limited set of dominant prototypical trajectories. Next, in Chapter 3, we aim to better understand how low quality and high quality collaboration are characterized within the context of TMTs with newcomer CEOs, and how practices employed by newcomer CEOs contribute to moving the TMT from low toward high collaboration quality over time. Following a grounded, interpretive research approach, we identify practices employed by newcomer CEOs that appear to have a collective; dynamic, and situated nature. Finally, Chapter 4 answers the research question ‘How do TMTs with newcomer CEOs fail to form high quality collaboration over time?’. Following a grounded, interpretive research approach, we present an ‘unowned’ view of process that highlights chance events and unintended consequences that result in an imploding dynamic within the TMT as a processual way of understanding how high quality collaboration fails to form over time.

Publication year:2019

Keywords:CEO succession, TMT dynamics, Collaboration quality, Process research

Accessibility:Closed