The impacts of new CEOs' psychological factors on post-succession strategic change

We use the psycholinguistic content analysis methods to investigate how new CEOs' psychological factors influence the post succession strategic changes (PSSC) of firms in the FTSE all share index. Taking the trilogy of mind perspective, on top of cognition, we advocate that new CEOs' emotion and conation serve as the impetus for the PSSC. By tracing the identical new CEOs over years after their succession in a non-experimental field study, empirical results of this longitudinal study demonstrate that those intra-individual psychological (time-varying) factors of new CEOs are important for the PSSC. New CEOs' future focus attention (FFA), commitment to change (C2C) will significantly increase the PSSC and new CEOs' negative emotion (NE) will significantly reduce the PSSC. The paper claims that incorporating more comprehensive factors in new CEOs' trilogy of mind can help us get a better picture for the mechanism behind PSSC.