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This paper aims to examine the effect of outside chief executive officer (CEO) succession on firm innovation in Chinese companies and to explore the mechanism behind the process. By analyzing the motivation of CEO successors of different origins in the context of selection, this paper identifies the factors affecting outside CEO successors’ decision-making on post-succession firm innovation.

A Poisson regression model is used on a sample of 1,084 firm-year observations taken from Chinese listed companies that endured CEO succession during the period of 2009–2016. Fixed-effect Poisson regression modeling was performed after likelihood ratio and Hausman testing to assess the robustness of the findings.

The results show that outside CEO successions are significantly and negatively associated with post-succession firm innovation. Moreover, the authors found a negative effect of outside CEO succession on post-succession firm innovation when the predecessor has a long tenure or the successor is older.

.This study contributes to the literature on CEO succession, CEO–board relationships and firm innovation by shedding light on how agency, human capital and career-concerning theories in the CEO selection context apply to corporate governance and strategy. Moreover, by exploring the factors influencing CEO successors’ decision-making in terms of firm innovation in the Chinese social and cultural context, this paper identifies ways to promote firm innovation for Chinese companies from the concept of leadership succession.

This study aims to examine the impact of controversial governance practices on media coverage under a specific context. Based on the attribution theory, this study develops a theoretical framework to explore how antecedent factors can influence attribution process under a particular cultural context.

This paper presents a behavioral view of the media and corporate governance to demonstrate how media attributes different reasons for the same controversial governance practice in Chinese-specific context. Using 1,198 non-state-owned listed company observations in China as the study sample, cross-section data are used to build a multiple linear regression mode to test hypotheses.

The analysis indicates that the media imposes fewer penalties on founder-CEO firms than on non-founder-CEO firms for engaging in controversial governance practices, such as CEO compensation. CEO tenure negatively moderates the effect of CEO compensation on negative media coverage in non-founder-CEO firms. The positive media bias evidence for founder-CEO firms exists only when the firm is better performed.

This study’s contribution to the governance literature starts with its logical reasoning of basic assumptions in the agency theory, and that media penalty will arise when managers impose actions that against interests of shareholders or other stakeholders. This study shows that the rule is not always true. The findings also bridge the connection of governance literature and reputation literature to better explain how media can act as a social arbitration role.

This study provides insights into how belief and information of reputational evaluators affect attribution consequences on controversial governance practices. Moreover, this study looks beyond the internal elements and focuses on China’s traditional cultural context as well. Specifically, the authors concentrate on the attribution process by showing the importance of evaluators’ framing tendency with regard to controversial practices. The results extend the knowledge about how conformity makes media coverage shows a bias effect on interactions during the evaluation process.

This study seeks to address three research questions: how technology capability impact business performance? Does the linkage between technology capability and business performance depend on specific contexts? Why do some high‐tech firms of strong technological capability fail?

The paper draws on various theoretical perspectives to develop hypotheses that propose a direct relationship between technological capability and business performance (both new product development and overall business performance), the mediating role of customer value, the possible moderating effects of business environment and other important contingent factors such as learning orientation. A conceptual framework is devised and tested that examines these relationships in general and in various contexts, which is believed more important and useful for firms to manage their technological capability more effectively.

Findings from high‐tech firms in China confirm the validity of the framework and afford various insights on the role of various contingent factors in the proposed relationships.

The paper provides a framework that examines companies' technological capability relationships.