Firms often retain their former CEOs on the board after succession to benefit from the former CEOs’ firm-specific expertise. However, their presence can inhibit successor CEOs from implementing meaningful strategic change, as the former CEOs seek to preserve their personal legacy and may see the strategic landscape differently, especially when the successor CEO is hired from outside the firm. Using a strategic leadership interface perspective, we propose that board members can alleviate this potential tension and enable strategic change. To test our theory, we focus on a subsample of succession events: when the former CEO stays on board as chair and the successor CEO is an outsider. This scenario is likely to result in strategic tension and cognitive differences between these two organizational leaders. We find that in such situations, boards with a higher proportion of outside directors experience greater post-succession strategic change; we find no effect in other succession scenarios. We isolate legacy conservation as a motivating factor by showing that the effect manifests for divestitures but not for acquisitions.

公司通常在继任后保留其前任 CEO 留在董事会，以从前任 CEO 的公司特定专业知识中受益。然而，他们的存在会阻碍继任 CEO 实施有意义的战略变革，因为前任 CEO 寻求保留他们的个人遗产，并且可能会以不同的方式看待战略格局，尤其是当继任 CEO 从公司外部聘请时。从战略领导界面的角度来看，我们建议董事会成员可以缓解这种潜在的紧张局势并实现战略变革。为了检验我们的理论，我们关注继任事件的子样本：当前任 CEO 继续担任董事长而继任 CEO 是局外人时。这种情况很可能会导致这两位组织领导者之间出现战略紧张和认知差异。我们发现，在这种情况下，外部董事比例较高的董事会在接班后会经历更大的战略变化；我们发现在其他继承方案中没有影响。我们将遗产保护作为一个激励因素，通过表明这种影响体现在资产剥离而不是收购中。