Acquisition As Exaptation: Relation Of Founding Institution Imprint And Strategic Decision For Chinese Corporations’ Cross-region M&A

With the dynamic environment of growing, the company’s irrational factor has become an important factor affecting the behavior of corporate strategy. Therefore, the issue of “How the cognitive factors affect corporate strategy" has become the focus of foreign scholars. But the traditional theory of cognitive concern is the individual mental models, and strategic management places whole company as the research subjects, which become the major obstacle to the development of strategic management cognitive Research. At the same time, since China joined WTO, in the context of dynamic environment and market competition,the cross-provinces M&A speed has become an important means for Chinese companies to maintain a competitive advantage. Many studies have found that the impact of cross-provincial corporate M & A is not only the result of their own abilities and resources, but also a decision, subject to the decision makers and other aspects of cognition.Therefore, based on the above theoretical and practical background, this dissertation raises a research on the relationship between the degree of founding marketization and cross-provinces M&A speed of Chinese firms in the angle of institution imprint.After literature review, this dissertation carries out a kind of empirical research using listed company database in China. Following Stinchcombe’s paradigm of " institution imprintcorporate behavior", this study seeks the relation logic between the degree of founding marketization and cross-provinces M&A speed.Hence, three hypotheses are raised. The author implements empirical research, in which the main statistics analysis is the multi-regression, using 688 samples from 1997-2013 listed companies with SPSS software.The results indicate some conclusions. Firstly, combinating the institution imprint theory and cognitive research in strategic management theory, we find past environment of sensitive period can be internalizaed as enterprises cognitive schema, which significantly affects the identification of market opportunities, and ultimately reflect differences in the behavior of corporate strategy.Secondly, a significant positive correlation between the degree of founding marketization and cross-provinces M&A speed, which means that when the degree of founding marketization higher, the company’s cross-provinces M&A speed faster. Secondly, the results, which refer to the degree of Risk Aversion has nagetive moderating effects on the relationship between degree of founding marketization and cross-provinces M&A speed, indicates that strategic decision-making speed depends not only on the cognitive schema, but also their risk attitude. Thirdly, the result indicates that different extraversion attitude represents different willingness of cross-provinces expansion. Fouthly, the institution heterogeneity is the key to overcome the “embedded agency paradox”.Through the study of the relationship of founding environment institution imprint and cross-province M&A, this paper make the contribution as follow :(1) Combining the institution imprint theory and cognitive research in strategic management theory, this research make the break through the problem of the research levels problem of the traditional cognitive research in the strategic management theory.which tries to answer the question of “How the cognitive factors affect corporate strategy" and ”what determines the strategic speed.(2) This research embedded Chinese context in institution imprint theory and the speed of M & A as the object of study,which further enriches institutional research in organization theory.(3) This research studies how cognition influences strategic behavior from the perspective of institution imprint theory, introducing the "time" impact of institution,informal institutional factors, “embedded agency paradox”, which further enriches the institutional research in organizational study.(4) This study used the empirical research to explain institutional theory, which provides an important theoretical contribution to the relationship between enterprises, institutions and institutional change research. Fouthly, this study uses normative empirical research methodology also offsets the relative native research about the speed of stratey.At the same time, the dissertation carries out analysis in the large samples empirical research,which deeply explore that how the past environmental impact enterprise’s current strategic behavior, specially the speed of corporate strategy.This helps to reveal the internal characteristics of Chinese firms’ strategic behavior more deeply, which may facilitate the native research to deeper insights.