Margarethe Wiersema

• BA, MBA, PhD
• Head of Faculty at University of California, Irvine

Scholarly interest in the firm’s top management is an important research topic given their influence on strategic decision-making and firm outcomes, as well as increased media attention and activist investor scrutiny of the firm’s executives. The past experiences, knowledge, and skills of the firm’s top management team (TMT) represent the stock of...

Research Summary Activist hedge funds are the new breed of corporate raiders, yet we know little about how the management and board of target firms respond to activist investors. Using a behavioral perspective, we propose that an activist's reputation for being confrontational conveys information to the target company as to what they are likely to...

Research summary We propose that due to financial market pressures, managers are forward‐looking in their search and decision processes and focus on meeting performance targets set by the financial community. Using panel data on S&P 100 companies, we find that pressure felt by management to meet the analyst consensus earnings estimate influences th...

Research summary The appointment of a new CEO is among the most pivotal and visible decisions made by a board of directors. While prior research has surveyed the impact of performance and governance related‐factors on CEO selection decisions, our understanding of the implications of a firm's global context is limited. This paper explores the influe...

Corporate strategy refers to the decisions of a firm’s top management concerning the scope of the firm, in terms of its geographic and product markets, as well as the degree of 10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_452. Corporate strategy defines the firm in terms of the extent of its international activities, the degree of vertical integration, and the divers...

The concept of generic strategy was first defined by 10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_649 in his book Competitive Advantage (1985). A strategy of cost leadership involves seeking the lowest cost structure in the industry; a strategy of differentiation is based on providing a product/service offering that is unique and has higher than average value in the...

Research Summary: Firm performance and corporate governance have been shown to influence CEO selection, but our understanding of the role of social capital is more limited. In this study, we seek to provide further insight into the role of social capital by examining the influence of both “bonding” and “bridging” forms of social capital on CEO appo...

As visible and knowledgeable experts who constantly collect, analyze, and disseminate information about the future prospects of publicly listed firms, financial analysts fulfill an important information brokerage and monitoring function for investors. By providing investment advice, financial analysts also influence the demand for a firm’s stock an...

In today’s world, CEOs are frequently dismissed following corporate misconduct or poor performance. Yet, it is often difficult to predict when boards will dismiss the CEOs, as the same behavior often results in different decisions across firms. Taking a socio-cognitive perspective, this article explores the factors that lead a CEO to become tarnish...

More than a decade ago, countries in Europe began to take measures to increase the gender diversity of their corporate boards. Norway was the first to adopt a quota for female board members (40%) in 2004. Other nations followed suit – adopting either mandatory quotas (Germany, France, Belgium, Iceland, Italy) or voluntary goals (Austria, Finland, t...

Corporate strategy refers to the decisions of a firm’s top management concerning the scope of the firm, in terms of its geographic and product markets, as well as the degree of vertical integration. Corporate strategy defines the firm in terms of the extent of its international activities, the degree of vertical integration, and the diversity of th...

The concept of generic strategy was first defined by Michael Porter in his book Competitive Advantage (1985). A strategy of cost leadership involves seeking the lowest cost structure in the industry; a strategy of differentiation is based on providing a product/service offering that is unique and has higher than average value in the marketplace; an...

Scholars studying upper echelons have found that executive succession can serve as an important adaptation mechanism. The bulk of these findings, however, derive from market-based governance settings, which raises an issue of contextual robustness. This study examines this issue by investigating the link between executive succession and strategic c...

Recent studies have documented that firms with corporate misconduct tend to replace their executives in order to repair their legitimacy. However, we know little about how the firm’s past (good) performance may protect the executives in the context of corporate misconduct. In this study, we propose and find that the likelihood of executive (both CE...

This study argues that globalization places demands on the firm’s managerial capabilities, which influence the board’s appointment of an internationally oriented CEO. A CEO’s international orientation is defined as the extent and diversity of an individual’s exposure to country environment(s) other than their firm’s country of origin. We argue that...

The appointment of a new CEO is among the most pivotal and visible decisions made by the board of directors. Yet while prior research provide insight into how firm specific factors influence the nature of the appointment, we know less about the role played by contextual factors such as external constituents. We focus on the role of institutional in...

The capital market’s efficiency in valuating companies is predicated through information. It is through the processing, dissemination, and interpretation of information that the constituents in the capital market formulate their valuation of the firm and its future prospects. Management’s information disclosure to the financial community, the probi...

To more completely understand the basis for firm performance differences, we need greater clarity on the drivers of differentiation in managerial strategic decision making, as well as on the impact these decisions have on the composition and configuration of the firm's resource portfolio. In this article, we provide an integrative framework that il...

While boards are known to react to corporate misconduct by removing the executives responsible, little is known about whether the board's response is shaped by the firm's social context. Using the 2006 stock option backdating scandal, in which firms manipulated stock option grant dates, we examine the impact of two dimensions of social context—the...

Because of the "opaque" nature of divestitures, investors face considerable uncertainty in evaluating divestiture decisions and thus may look to a firm's social context, defined in terms of the pervasiveness of divestiture activity in its industry, to infer the quality of such a decision. Specifically, we propose that a firm's position in an indust...

While poor firm performance has been shown to be a predictor of CEO dismissal, little is known about the role of external constituents on the board's decision to dismiss the firm's CEO. In this study, we propose that investment analysts, as legitimate third-party evaluators of the firm and its leadership, provide certification as to the CEO's abili...

Despite a wealth of empirical research, whether and how international diversification impacts firm performance remains one of the major unresolved research questions in the fields of strategy and international business. We propose that the lack of consensus about the nature of the international diversification–firm performance relationship results...

Scholars studying upper echelons have found that an organizationfs leadership is of primary strategic importance, and that executive succession can serve as an important adaptation mechanism by which a company can change its strategic course. While literature on the influence of corporate governance in executive succession has expanded greatly, the...

As a direct result of the corporate scandals that started with Enron and led to general unrest in the financial markets, the Securities and Exchange Commission required chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief financial officers of large publicly traded companies to certify their financial statements. Using market signaling theory, we propose that...

Strategy researchers are increasingly turning their attention from examining the impact of strategic choices on firm performance to examining the factors that determine strategic choices at the firm level. This shift of research orientation has meant that researchers are increasingly faced with a limited dependent variable (LDV) that takes a limite...

This paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the firm by explicitly broadening the range of questions answered by a theory of the firm. We seek to consolidate the fragments of the theory of the firm, currently scattered throughout the literature, into a single document in order to present a more coherent exposition. As part of this process, we e...

The article discusses the role of investment analysts in the decision by the company's board of directors to dismiss the chief executive officer (CEO). The authors believe investment analysts are an integral source of information which can influence the board's evaluation of the firm and its decision to terminate the CEO. The meaning of several fin...

The globalization of markets and industries has fundamentally changed the competitive conditions facing firms. Yet, how globalization has influenced the international diversification strategies of firms is an issue largely overlooked in both the strategic management and international business literatures. This paper develops a theoretical framework...

Dynamic capabilities manifest the organizational capacity to purposefully create or modify the firm's resource base. In this paper, we consider resource divestment an important firm-level resource management capability that manifests a two-step organizational change routine. Firms must first be motivated to engage in resource divestment, and then d...

Systematic investigation of leaders and their influence on organizations has been a major area of research interest. In examining the upper echelon-organizational outcome linkage, researchers have come to focus on the issue of executive succession. This focus has been due in large part to an emerging theoretical perspective that managerial differen...

Corporate strategic decisions regarding the international and product market scope of a firm’s activities are the essence of corporate strategy, and how these choices in turn affect performance is the subject of a large body of research in the fields of international business and strategic management. When making these strategic decisions, managers...

Strategy researchers are increasingly turning their attention from examining the implications of strategic choices on firm performance to examining the factors that determine strategic choice at the firm level. This shift of research orientation has meant that researchers are increasingly faced with a limited dependent variable (LDV) that takes a l...

One of the most visible adjustments in company strategies in recent years was the dramatic increase in the level of corporate restructuring activity that took place during the 1980s. Strategic decisions that result in the realignment of firms with their environments are likely to be influenced by the composition of the top management team. This stu...

Scholars working in the strategy area have long held that one of the primary ways in which organizations adapt to external changes is through strategic choice. Inasmuch as a new CEO can result in a new strategic direction for the firm, the CEO turnover event itself is an important way by which organizations can signal an alteration in the direction...

Since the mid-1980s U.S. domestic firms have faced significant increases in foreign-based (i.e., import) competition as reductions in barriers to international commerce have resulted in markets and industries becoming increasingly global. Despite the growing and widespread importance of foreign-based competition, the influence that such competition...

The resource based view of the firm (RBV) argues that the firm's portfolio of resources provides the basis for competitive advantage. Accordingly, a firm-level decision to divest of resource capacity is a strategically significant organizational change event--and one that entails risk--but empirical research has not considered why firms undertake s...

Significant reductions in barriers to international commerce since the mid-1970s have resulted in markets and industries becoming increasingly integrated across nations. A key consequence of industry globalization has been substantially increased levels of foreign competition in the markets of most nations, and in particular in the U.S. marketplace...

Research on strategic choices available to the firm are often modeled as a limited number of possible decision outcomes and leads to a discrete limited dependent variable. A limited dependent variable can also arise when values of a continuous dependent variable are partially or wholly unobserved. This chapter discusses the methodological issues as...

The globalization of industries over the past two decades has resulted in domestic markets facing increasing inroads by foreign competitors. Utilizing resource-based theory, this paper examines how increased foreign competition impacts a firm's diversification strategy. Building on the important role of a firm's core competences as the basis for su...

The linkage between the interrelationships of a firm’s lines of business and corporate financial performance has been the subject of extensive research in the strategy field. Yet very little research has examined this key relationship within firms operating in Continental Europe. This study investigates firm relatedness and its further relationship...

When a company does well, its CEO is showered with money and adulation. When it does poorly, the CEO gets the blame--and the boot. For better or worse, investors now view chief executives as the primary determinant of corporate performance. But the reality is that most companies perform no better after they dismiss their CEOs than they did in the y...

Measures developed for the analysis of corporate diversification have become fundamental to a broad range of strategy research. This paper examines the content validity of the two most widely used continuous measures of related diversification—the related component of the entropy index and the concentric index—and raises fundamental questions about...

This paper integrates corporate governance research on the consequences of executive power and the upper echelons literature on top managers' cognitive orientation to develop a framework in which the characteristics of the chief executive officer (CEO) predict corporate strategic refocusing. With data from a sample of large and diversified firms, w...

Die Diversifikation eines Unternehmens ist ökonomisch nur dann zu rechtfertigen, wenn dadurch ein Mehrwert geschaffen wird, der sich dann auch positiv auf das Unternehmensergebnis auswirkt. Doch bei welcher Art von Diversifikation kann dieser Mehrwert eher erwartet werden? Dieser Frage wird in der Forschung unter dem Begriff der "Verbundenheit" nac...

The American Journal of Gastroenterology (2000) 95, 2551; doi:10.1111/j.1572-0241.2000.02842.x

Utilizing a model drawn from both transaction cost economics and social exchange theory, we analyze determinants of strategic flexibility in a sample of strategic alliances involved in joint development agreements or joint research pacts. Findings indicate that, in general, determinants suggested by transaction cost economics provided flexibility i...

A central focus of empirical research in strategic management has been to understand the relationships associated with the structure–strategy–performance paradigm. To examine these relationships, investigators have relied extensively on cross-sectional methods that embody the implicit assumption that model parameters are stable across firms and ove...

A central focus of empirical research in strategic management has been to understand the relationships associated with the structure–strategy–performance paradigm. To examine these relationships, investigators have relied extensively on cross-sectional methods that embody the implicit assumption that model parameters are stable across firms and ove...

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....

The safety, benefits and clinical impact of EUS FNA in evaluating lymph nodes (EN) adjacent to the GI tract has not been studied. METHODS: 148 patients underwent EUS FNA of 211 LN for staging and/or primary diagnostic purposes. Preprocedure CT was available in 128 patients. Adequate follow up occurred in 143 patients (mean age 61 years, range 16-93...

Empirical research in strategic management has relied extensively on the use of cross-section data analysis. This paper undertakes a formal examination of methodological issues raised by a cross-section analysis. Specifically we address the limited ability of a cross-section analysis to account for coefficient variation across firms and over time....

The resource-based view of the firm has provided important new insights into corporate strategy (Barney, 1991; Peteraf, 1993); however, there has been only limited empirical research linked to the theory (e.g., Farjoun, 1994). Although a great deal of work has been done on Corporate diversification, the measures and data typically have a weak conne...

This study investigates the effects of LBOs on corporate growth and diversification in large U.S. firms which underwent leveraged buyouts during the 1980s. Based on the analysis, this study found that revenue and employee growth are significantly lower in LBO firms than in control firms that remained public. Strategically, we find that LBO firms de...

Based on an organizational adaptation framework, this study examines the influence of three environmental dimensions–munificence, stability, and complexity–on top management team turnover. In addition to investigating the direct influence of these environmental dimensions, indirect effects through firm performance and strategic change are also exam...

This study demonstrates how demography theory can be extended to non-U.S. settings by developing a comprehensive model of factors that vary across nations and that may moderate the link between demographic characteristics and organizational outcomes. We propose that constraints on variation as well as sociocultural and organizational processes mode...

This study examined the relationship between the demography of top management teams and corporate strategic change, measured as absolute change in diversification level, within a sample of Fortune 500 companies. Controlling for prior firm performance, organizational size, top team size, and industry structure, we found that the firms most likely to...

This paper uses a detailed database on corporate operations to investigate the effects of leveraged buyouts on corporate restructuring activity in a sample of 33 large LBO firms. The evidence we present strongly suggests that the governance structure of LBO firms is able to induce managers to forego growth and downsize firms more effectively than t...

A personal-computer-based system for ultrasound imaging that has been helpful in assessing the clinical potential of high-frequency ultrasonography is described. At these higher frequencies, the system should provide images of the intact rectal wall with a tissue penetration capability of 1 cm. In order to meet these requirements the system design...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1985. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 278-285). Chair: C.K. Prahalad.

This study researched the phenomenon of strategic change at the corporate level among large manufacturing firms. Shifts in strategic direction were measured using changes in the importance of the firm's dominant business activity or core business. This measure for strategic redirection captures changes in the mix as well as emphasis of businesses w...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/36261/2/b140894x.0001.001.pdf http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/36261/1/b140894x.0001.001.txt