Impression management against early dismissal? CEO succession and corporate social responsibility

摘要

This study builds on insights from both upper echelons theory and agency perspective to examine the effect on corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of CEO succession. Drawing on prior literature on impression management and analyzing the CEO selection process, we argue that CEO successors are motivated to improve CSR performance as a tactic of impression management in the CEO succession context in the hope of securing their leadership against the early dismissal. Additionally, we explore the moderating effect of CEO characteristics, specifically age and origin, on the relationship between CEO succession and CSR. Based on a sample of 3360 firm-year data in 736 Chinese listed companies from the period of 2008-2016, we find that CEO succession has a positive effect on post-succession CSR and CEO age enhances the effect while CEO outside origin weakens this effect.