| Since the reform and opening up in 1978,the reform of state-owned enterprises(hereafter,SOEs)has become an essential component of China’s economic reform and the basis of the national economy development.In 2021,the government report continued to clearly state that “implement the three-year action of SOE reform in depth to strengthen,improve and enlarge state-owned capital and SOEs”.As the mainline of SOE reform,ownership reform,referring to the transfer of state-owned ownership to partially or entirely private ownership and introducing market investors,has always been a crucial approach to revitalize SOEs and build a market-oriented institution in SOEs.It is commonly recognized that the reform will play roles immediately after the ownership transfer.However,the promotion of operation efficiency,innovation performance,and market competitiveness would not be achieved overnight.“Rome was not built a day”.The marketization of former SOEs is a forwarding journey under the mist that needs time to solve the problems and adapt to the situational dynamism.During the marketization of privatized SOEs,decision-makers need to adjust the strategical makings according to the status of the organization and the stage of marketization in which privatized SOEs are embedded.Besides,the preferences and logics of different involvers in the marketization and the building of privatized SOEs vary,leading to various patterns and results of marketization evolvements.Examining the incremental marketization process in SOE restructuring and the unique attributes of different marketization involvers(i.e.,private capital)is vital for profoundly understanding the variation of whether and how firms achieve the desired performance after the ownership transfer from SOEs to POEs.It also contributes to understanding the evolving pattern of privatized SOEs and the decision logic of organization executives,helping reach a better cohesion and synergy between state capital with private capital.Innovation is a new driving force for the country’s high-quality economic development and industrial upgrading.It is also an effective solution for firms to cope with market competition and uncertainty.“Whether and how to improve the innovation of state-owned enterprises through restructuring and privatization” has long been the focus of practical and academic fields.The improvement of innovation intensity is the key to the successful transformation of the former SOEs under the government’s leadership to POEs.It also helps the privatized SOEs effectively cope with market competition and environmental uncertainty after leaving government intervention and facing soft budget constraints.However,significant controversies remain in existing research from both effect and mechanism perspectives regarding“whether and how privatization reform affects the innovation of privatized SOEs?”Chapter 4 of this thesis takes Chinese listed companies as a sample.It adopts the PSM-DID method to test and find that the privatization of SOEs does not significantly improve or have a robust effect on firms’ innovation intensity or performance.Instead,significant fluctuations exist when examining privatized SOEs’ innovation input and performance in a long-time window.This result also shows that the privatization reform is not a situation that “happens overnight” with the change of ownership.After the ownership change(hereafter “post-restructuring period”),the state-owned institutional logic and organization Inertia will not only influence the decision-making process of executives but also interact with various institutional logics of market entities who participated in marketization reforms,further affecting the innovation strategies of enterprises and resulting in differences and fluctuations of innovative intensity and performance.However,few prior studies noticed this.Instead,most studies remain on the issue of “the ‘net effect’ brought about by privatization on corporate innovation”,neglecting the change in the post-restructuring period and organizational variation across privatized SOEs.This thesis proposes that: the decision-making upon innovation strategy of privatized SOEs in the “post-restructuring period” is a dynamic evolution process consisting of exploration,trial,and conflicts.The innovation activities of privatized SOEs in the “post-restructuring period” are characterized by two traits.First,decision-makers may change the innovative search intensity according to organizational transformation stages.Second,because the market entities participating in the post-restructuring period have different institutional logics and decision-making preferences,the privatized SOEs face logical conflicts in the marketoriented transformation.Therefore,privatized SOEs in the post-restructuring period show significant differences in innovation input and performance.To sum up,based on the theoretical perspective of organizational performance feedback and institutional logic,this paper focuses on exploring how privatized SOEs make innovative decisions in the “fog” of the “post-restructuring period”?To solve this problem,the author first reviews the privatization of SOEs,institutional theory,and performance feedback theory in detail.The second chapter reviews the theoretical basis of this thesis,including the performance feedback theory and institutional logic perspective.The third chapter reviews the evolution of SOEs reform,the concept and connotation of the privatization of SOEs,the antecedents of the privatization of SOEs,and the impact result and mechanism of the privatization of SOEs and restructuring affecting organizational innovation.On this basis,the theoretical gap of the research is excavated,and a theoretical model is constructed.Specifically,this thesis pays close attention to the three questions below:(1)When privatized SOEs face inconsistent performance feedback,how do they conduct an internally innovative search?(2)When privatized SOEs face ambiguous performance feedback,how do they launch an externally innovative search?(3)How does family institutional logic affect innovation strategies of privatized firms in the “post-restructuring period”?The author takes the Chinese listed companies as a research sample and collects and integrates data from multiple sources to analyze the above questions.In the empirical analysis,methods such as propensity score matching,difference-indifference,two-way fixed effect,and interaction term models are adopted for empirical testing.The research details and main conclusions of each part are as follows.The fourth chapter serves as the pilot research of this whole dissertation.Based on fully describing the research data and sample,it examines the impact of privatized reform,that is,the change of firms’ ownership from state-owned to non-state-owned,on the innovation activities of enterprises is achieved.On this basis,the heterogeneity of samples across different industries and enterprises is discussed.The results of this chapter show that the effect of privatization on enterprise innovation activities is far from the simple positive or negative impacts presented in previous studies but a highly dynamic and heterogeneous result.It is not easy for privatized SOEs and managers to realize the competitiveness promotion and marketization of them due to the historical and market entity identities.The transformation process of SOEs to private enterprises is often different due to multiple factors such as the marketoriented transformation stage and the participants’ differences.The fifth chapter addresses the first research question-How do privatized companies conduct internal innovation search activities when facing inconsistent performance feedback? Inconsistent performance feedback refers to privatized firms performing at a higher level than their SOE counterparts and lower than their entrepreneurial counterparts(entrepreneurial private firms are private firms that are not restructured from SOEs and are founded solely on market capital).This chapter finds that privatized firms’ internally innovative search in the post-restructure period is a contingency process,and decision-makers adjust the strategy of innovation search based on the status of organizational performance,i.e.,the relative performance gap to peer SOEs and peer entrepreneurial private firms in the market.Specifically: first,as the performance of privatized enterprises gradually approaches that of entrepreneurial private enterprises in the market,decision-makers will have more confidence and motivation to launch internally innovation search to catch up with market competitors and improve organizational competitiveness;on the contrary,when the performance of privatized enterprises is closer to that of SOEs,decisionmakers will reduce innovative search to protect their image,avoid unnecessary risks,and maintain the strategic status quo.Second,when the executive compensation is lower,and the privatized SOEs’ performance is closer to peer entrepreneurial private enterprises relative to peer SOEs,privatized SOEs will have a higher internally innovative search intensity.Third,when the government subsidy of SOEs is lower,and the privatized SOE’s performance is closer to peer entrepreneurial private enterprises relative to peer SOEs,privatized SOEs will have a higher internally innovative search intensity.Fourth,when the industry competition intensity is lower,and privatized SOE’s performance is closer to peer entrepreneurial private enterprises relative to peer SOEs,privatized SOEs will have a higher internally innovative search intensity.The sixth chapter addresses the second research question: How do privatized firms conduct externally innovative search activities when facing ambiguous performance feedback? Ambiguity refers to the difficulty of effectively locating the problem faced by the organization when facing performance feedback,i.e.,the ambiguity of the problem location.This ambiguity also affects the company’s search strategy,specifically in the search strategy for external knowledge and opportunities.Research in this chapter proposes that when the performance of privatized SOEs is significantly lower than that of SOEs in the same industry,decision-makers will be challenging to locate the problem effectively and face the ambiguity of performance feedback.Under these circumstances,the organization’s external innovative search will be inhibited based on the threat-rigidity mechanism.Specifically,the greater the performance gap between privatized SOEs and their SOE counterparts,the more difficult it is to locate organizational problems in the marketization process effectively.So the intensity of privatized enterprises’ externally innovative search will be lower.When the ambiguity of performance feedback is reduced,the externally innovative intensity of the organization will increase.First,when privatized enterprises face negative performance feedback from peer SOEs and the larger the performance deficit with entrepreneurial private enterprises,the more inclined the enterprises are to conduct externally innovative searches.Second,when the proportion of independent directors is higher,the more privatized enterprises tend to conduct externally innovative searches.The seventh chapter addresses the third issue-how does family institutional logic affect the market-based innovation strategies of privatized firms in the "postrestructured period" ? This chapter shows an inherent conflict between the family logic of "non-economic preferences and family interests" and the market logic of "business preferences and market efficiency," which inhibits the level of market transformation of privatized family firms.Specifically,in SOE-reformed family firms,market innovation is lower than in other privatized SOEs.Second,when the clan culture is more intense in the region where family firms are located,the SOEreformed family firms will have a lower innovation input level than other privatized firms.Third,when SOE-reformed family enterprises are in the family inheritance stage,their innovation input is lower than other privatized enterprises.Fourth,when SOE-reformed family firms have non-family managers,the gap between their innovation input and other privatized firms will be reduced.The contributions of this paper are mainly manifested in four aspects.First,by noticing the dynamic marketization process of privatized SOEs after the ownership transfer from state to market,i.e.,in the post-privatization period,this thesis contends the innovation of privatized SOEs is in a dynamic evolving pattern through exploration and trial in uncertainty.On the one hand,organization decision makers would adjust the innovative search strategy due to the phase of organization transformation.On the other hand,the people following different institutional logics have different preference and motivation for organizational innovation activities which leads to the heterogeneity of innovative input.This thesis takes the microorganizational and strategical management perspectives on the impact and mechanism of privatization influence on organizational innovation,creating a new lens to see how privatized SOEs carry out marketization and innovation.Second,this paper contributes to the performance feedback theory.Specifically,in response to the question of "how do problem-solving principles and selfimprovement principles work when organizations face inconsistent performance feedback",this thesis argues that the preference of organizational decision-makers upon particular decision principle are not static.The decision-makers will adopt a certain decision pattern in reference to self-interest and the organization’s status.In the context of privatization of SOEs in China,when privatized firms face inconsistent performance feedback,that is,performing at a higher level than their SOE counterparts and lower than their entrepreneurial counterparts(entrepreneurial private firms are private firms that are not restructured from SOEs and are founded solely on market capital),as the performance of privatized enterprises gradually approaches that of entrepreneurial private enterprises in the market,The coping strategies of decision-makers will change from self-enhancing rules to problem-solving rules.Third,in response to the question of "how to choose a particular response method when organizational decision-makers face a performance gap below aspiration level ",this thesis contributes to performance feedback theory and corporate behavior theory.Based on the perspective of causality identification in performance feedback,this paper proposes the influence of ambiguity of problem orientation on how decision-makers initiate specific search strategies.In the context of privatization and restructuring of SOEs in China,When the performance of privatized enterprises is lower than that of SOEs,the managers will face the ambiguity of problem positioning due to the high complexity of the privatization process and the limitation of managers’ experience in dealing with privatization,so that the organizations may be afraid to conduct high-risk problem search activities.Fourth,based on the research context of Chinese SOEs marketization and the phenomenon of familization in the process of SOEs’ reform,this thesis contributes to the question: "how non-economic logic(i.e.,family logic)interacts with economic logic" and how this interaction further influences the organizational innovation.While prior research primarily focuses on how the external institutional environment influence the privatization and marketization of SOEs,this thesis examines how the internal conflict between the non-economic preferences centered on family interests and the commercial preferences and efficiency cores of market logic affects organizational innovation activities.Besides,we further take look at the organization’s internal governance and external cultural boundary conditions on the innovation strategy of privatized SOEs.This thesis puts forward the policy suggestions due to these findings and results above.First,SOEs’ marketization is a long-time,dynamic,and flexible process of organizational transformation,which is hard and complicated to realize the desired goals.For decision-makers,the past identities and characteristics of SOEs will have a long-lasting influence on organizational development and management decisions in various ways.Decision-makers of privatized SOEs need to select and initiate corresponding innovation strategies in different stages and different kinds of firms.Second,Although the reform of SOEs needs the courage of reform and extensive management ability in the early stage,in the deepening stage of the SOE reform,to obtain sustainable high-quality development,it needs the ability of fine management "governing a big country is like cooking a small fish".During the marketization of SOEs,decision-makers should be good at using different organizational strategies to solve potential problems and improve strategic flexibility.When privatized SOEs face potential problems during the post-restructuring period,managers should use different market-oriented strategies,such as internally and externally innovative search,to improve problem-solving efficiency.It is worth noting that this strategic flexibility needs to be achieved based on an accurate understanding of organizational problems.Therefore,in the management of privatized SOE,attention should be paid to improving the professionalism of managers,especially those who used to work in SOEs and hierarchical systems,to analyze,interpret and solve business problems in time.Third,it is essential to be adept at using external reference points and set aspirational levels to analyze the state of the organization and make adaptive changes to organizational strategies.The setting of reference group should change from single-dimensional reference group to multi-dimensional reference group,and establish a scientific,multi-dimensional and dynamic reference evaluation system in the new era.Constructing different reference points,especially for SOE competitors and market private-sector competitors,can help organizational decision-makers better judge the transformation stage and effect of SOE restructuring,thus improving the robustness and accuracy of subsequent corporate management and strategy formulation.Finally,although the participation of market players in the marketization of former SOEs can introduce market-oriented operation methods and mechanisms in firms,the effect of market logic integration within the organization is determined by the interaction of different logics and preferences of the participating market players.Therefore,privatized SOEs need to have a more in-depth understanding of marketoriented partners,strengthen their knowledge of the investment logic of different market-oriented stakeholders,take into account the interests of all parties,and try to avoid conflicts caused by the logic conflicts between market players and state parties as well as among different non-state parties,thus to achieve a better understanding of the market’s efficiency logic.In this way,the efficiency logic of the market can be better applied and complemented,therefore realizing the "win-win" of state and market capital. |
PDF Full Text Request