title: Exploring antecedents and consequences of top management succession and replacements in large multinational firms
Creators: name: Wedell-Wedellsborg, Mads Emil
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2023

description: This doctoral thesis investigates various aspects of top management succession through 
4 papers. The aim is to develop a holistic understanding of factors shaping the process of 
replacing top managers and the consequences of such changes – both for the firms involved 
and individual prospective top managers. Particularly, it focuses on different levels of 
leadership (senior leadership teams and CEO) and different contexts impacting the 
replacements. The first paper (chapter 2) examines the extended senior leadership team of 
Fortune 500 Global firms, assessing how they can ensure strong strategic agility through 
behavioural integration (i.e., tenure overlaps) and shared distributed cognition (i.e., knowledge 
overlaps). The chapter shows how bringing these two dimensions together in a 3 by 3 
framework enables firms to understand how too little succession and too much succession can 
both be bad for the firm. Furthermore, it shows that firms need to handle the inevitable 
successions appropriately. Chapter 3 advances the understanding of top management team 
(TMT) succession by developing a new conceptual framework that theoretically explains the 
mechanisms guiding direct non-CEO top management replacements (i.e., when a new 
individual takes over in a specific role, e.g., a CFO for a CFO). The framework is based on a 
theoretical extension of the fit-drift/shift-refit model. The specific framework looks at the 
characteristic of the new TMT member vis-à-vis his or her immediate predecessor and the 
incumbent TMT. By comparing the new executive against the predecessor and the TMT, the 
thesis can build a more comprehensive model of explaining what drives the TMT composition. 
The second half of the thesis takes a more empirical view, examining different levels 
of leadership (TMT and CEO) as well as different contexts guiding replacements. Chapter 4
empirically investigates the mechanisms of the framework presented in chapter 3, by 
examining a sample of the world’s largest firm (Fortune 500 Global). The paper presents a 
comprehensive coding of direct replacements of top managers, allowing for a comparison with 
the individual member and the incumbent TMT, providing solid insights into changes in the 
executives' experience background. The empirical analysis is based on a multi-level model of 
TMT replacements. In chapter 5, the thesis utilises a sample of American listed firms, finding
that CEO succession following corporate misconduct is associated with higher executive job 
demands, which the new CEO gets rewarded for through a higher initial compensation 
compared to non-misconduct CEO succession. Because of the rarity of misconduct, the thesis 
applies a matched sample approach, directly comparing CEO succession following misconduct
with CEO succession in non-misconduct situations. Thereby the chapter contributes to the 
research on misconduct, CEO initial pay and TMT succession. 
Together this thesis thereby contributes to various theoretical and empirical factors of 
succession. It does so by bringing the papers together in chapter 6, showing the relevance of 
studying top management succession through different levels of leadership and with different 
contexts in focus.