| In recent years, corporate strategic action and strategy selection have been highly focused by strategic management scholars. The specific strategic actions taken by enterprises with different governance mechanisms and the corresponding internal and external affecting factors have become new directions for the integrated study on corporate governance and strategic management. Actually, the strategic actions are taken to achieve the growth of enterprises, including the endogenous development and exogenous development. Wherein, the endogenous development refers to the continuous operation results of the enterprise, and exogenous development is mainly achieved by outward-oriented strategic actions by virtue of mergers and acquisitions.Merger and acquisition are important means for enterprises to achieve the exogenous development and carry out the outward-oriented strategies, and they have been widely concerned by scholars both at home and abroad. And studies in this respect include motives, decision-making, performance and continuous action of merger and acquisition. Data from Qing Ke database show that there are totally 707 mergers and acquisitions in China in 2013, increasing by one time than 2012, and there are totally 2431 cases of merger and acquisition from 2013 to 2015 in China. With the surging wave of mergers and acquisitions in China, there are increasingly increased studies on mergers and acquisitions at home, but among them, few are made from the perspective of corporate governance, in particular the relationship between and characteristics of the company’s two strategic decision-making bodies-Board of Directors and CEO.The Board of Directors is a decision-making body of modern companies, which is responsible for the supervision of the management personnel and providing suggestions for the company’s development. Meanwhile, as a decision-making body, the Board will directly play its due role through the selection of strategic actions. As the leader of the senior management team and even the whole company, CEO is taking the important responsibility of implementing the strategies, and meanwhile, CEO’s relationship with the Board will directly cast an influence on the making and implementation of the company’s strategic decisions. According to the Upper Echelon Theory, the educational background, professional and functional experience, and other characteristics of the senior-management decision makers will also have a significant impact on the strategic choice of enterprises. Most of previous studies focus on the impact of characteristics of the senior management team on the company’s strategies and performance, and few of them pay attention to characteristics of the decision-making body, the Board of directors. At the same time, the Group Decision Making Theory indicates that senior management personnel with different individual characteristics, educational backgrounds and professional experience give the whole team differentiated awareness and management decision-making ability. Therefore, compared to the homogeneous team, it is more worthwhile to study the impact of heterogeneous team on the organizational behavior and strategic actions. Therefore, in this paper, the author takes the heterogeneity of the Board, namely the characteristic variable reflecting the team’s overall knowledge base and structure as the entry point to study its impact on enterprises’ outward-oriented strategic actions. In terms of the choice of moderating effect, the previous studies mainly focus on the role of equity structure, ownership nature and other properties of the company, and in this paper, the author takes the principal-agent theory as the theoretical basis, and finds that CEO power will cast a direct influence on the Board’s strategic engagement, and will also play a role in moderating the relationship between the heterogeneity of the Board and the company’s strategic actions. Therefore, this paper takes the panel data from 2011 to 2014 of 153 companies listed in Growth Enterprises Market from 2009 to 2010 as the sample and explores the impact of the heterogeneity of the company’s decision making team-the Board on the company’s outward-oriented strategic actions (namely the mergers and acquisitions) based on the Upper Echelon Theory and Group Decision Making Theory, and analyzes the moderating effect of different-degree CEO powers on the main effect. It has been found that there is a positive correlation between the Board’s occupational heterogeneity (including heterogeneity of functional background, educational background, industry background and term of service) and the company’s outward-oriented strategic actions, and a negative correlation between the social heterogeneity (mainly the age heterogeneity) and the company’s outward-oriented strategic actions; while the CEO power is negatively correlated to the relationship between occupational heterogeneity and the company’s outward-oriented strategic actions, and is of an insignificant moderating effect on social heterogeneity and company’s outward-oriented strategic actions. |
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