CEO Intra-personal Experience Diversity and Strategic Change: Toward a Nuanced Understanding

Are new CEOs with diverse career experience more likely to promote strategic change early after their appointment? We attempt to address this question by integrating seemingly opposing predictions in the managerial cognition literature. We argue that new CEOs with high and low levels of intra-personal experience diversity will promote higher strategic change early after taking charge – compared to those at relatively moderate levels. Analyzing 115 CEO successions, we find support for the theorized U-shaped relationship between intra-personal CEO experience diversity and strategic change. Furthermore, our results suggest that this relationship is influenced by post-CEO-succession TMT turnover. We contribute to the literature on strategic change by adding a more nuanced perspective to the emerging research on new CEO career experience diversity, and its effects on corporate strategy.