| The dissertation starts up with case studies on Nokia, NCR and Polaroid which had very similar destinies in their histories. Case studies indicate that the three firms had all missed very important opportunities in their separate times of key customers’needs and technologies transition periods although they had been leaders and had controlled leading-edge technologies in separate industries. So they had all came down and been thoroughly defeated by their competitors. If they had all refused to accept new technologies and make any changes, there would be no value for the dissertation to study. However, the truth was that they had all made changes but had all failed. The reason was that the three firms had not totally transformed their business models to adapt rapidly changing environments because of inappropriate strategic decisions coming from the limitations of CEOs’perceptions and behaviors.Based on case studies above, the dissertation aims to explore how different CEOs’ perceptions and behaviors affect the application and development of firms’dynamic capabilities, and moderate firm’s strategic actions on adapting rapidly changing environments. The dissertation chooses software outsourcing firms from Beijing, Tianjin, Dalian and Jinan as samples to research. The summaries of theoretical and empirical research are as following:(1) The dissertation has found that studies on antecedents of dynamic capabilities are obvious not enough from reviewing the concept, dimensions and methodologies of dynamic capabilities. There are obvious overlapped and vague parts between dynamic capabilities and their antecedents in aspects of concepts and dimensions, which have caused understanding ambiguities and negatively affected the value of relevant studies. So the dissertation concentrates on the antecedents of dynamic capabilities in rigorous way. Reviewing studies indicates that the concept and dimension of dynamic capabilities from Barreto (2010) have preciseness and comprehensive usability, coming from reviewing over40top class literatures. The dissertation adopts Barreto (2010)’s perspective as a starting point of research to build relevant theoretical boundary.(2) The dissertation have reviewed mainstreaming strategic leadership literatures and found that top managers play an important role in transforming resources into dynamic capabilities. More and more scholars tend to explore origins of dynamic capabilities from micro-level of organizations. Rodenbach and Brettel (2012) built some relationships between CEO Experience, dynamic R&D capabilities and dynamic marketing capabilities. The dissertation tries to build more comprehensive relationships between CEO experience and dynamic capabilities from firm-level in sensing, decision-making and resource reconfiguring perspectives. Empirical research indicates that CEO firm experience and CEO age have no significant negative effects on dynamic capabilities. On the other hand, CEO international experience and functional experience have significant positive effects on dynamic capabilities.(3) The dissertation have also reviewed literatures on CEO psychology and found that CEO psychological attributes affect their strategic choices. Studies indicate that demographic variables (e.g., age, education or experience) research on CEOs’decision-making can not reflect the whole psychological attributes of CEO behaviors although they truly affect CEOs’ decision-making. So scholars have successfully applied the famous "Big Five Inventory" of personality from psychology researches into strategic leadership studies to solve the problem. The dissertation tries to build theoretical relationships between CEO personality and dynamic capabilities. Empirical work results indicate that extraversion, openness and emotional stability have significant positive effect on dynamic capabilities. However, agreeableness has no positive effect on dynamic capabilities, and conscientiousness has no negative effect on dynamic capabilities.(4) Based on case studies conclusions of the dissertation, strategic leadership literature, CEO psychological attributes literatures and literatures on how environmental uncertainty affects dynamic capabilities, the dissertation tries to explore the interacting relationships between CEO experience and environmental uncertainty. That is how CEO experience moderates the relationships between environmental uncertainty and dynamic capabilities. Empirical work indicates that CEO international experience and functional experience have significant positive moderating effects between environmental uncertainty and dynamic capabilities.
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