Strategic Entrepreneurship And The Performance Of Chinese Listed Companies

In the context of economic globalization,the domestic and international economic situation is becoming increasingly complex,with volatile market changes and rapidly changing technology leading to black swan events and more uncertainty for enterprises.At the same time,new ideas and new organizations are emerging,and volatility,complexity,and ambiguity are constantly breaking through corporate and industry boundaries.Today’s market environment has long been more unpredictable than ever,and it has become a challenge for companies to build and maintain their competitive advantage.In addition,the real-world suitability of mainstream business growth theories such as strategic management and entrepreneurial management is decreasing.On the one hand,strategic management focuses on matching the enterprise with the market and the rationality of resource allocation.In the face of the existing competitive advantage,enterprises will keep repeating the current operation mode and strategic decisions,which will then create the problems of core competence rigidity and organizational inertia and eventually make it difficult for enterprises to make timely responses in the face of the rapidly changing external environment.On the other hand,in the process of entrepreneurship,companies are obsessed with pursuing new opportunities,failing to manage entrepreneurial behavior rationally,resulting in ineffective allocation of resources,or failing to allocate resources due to excessive pursuit of opportunity development,all of which will cause companies to encounter bottlenecks in their management capabilities,so they cannot succeed in new business areas and may even drag down existing businesses.As a result,an increasing number of companies are realizing that a single strategic management without an entrepreneurial orientation and a single entrepreneurial activity without a strategic orientation cannot adapt to the rapidly changing market environment,and strategic entrepreneurship,which can simultaneously develop advantages and explore opportunities,has emerged.Strategic entrepreneurship creates a constructive balance by combining entrepreneurial-based behaviors with strategic management-based behaviors.Strategic entrepreneurship creates a continuous "stream of advantage" and "stream of opportunity" and is an important way for companies to gain sustainable advantage in the face of a highly uncertain and dynamic competitive environment.Based on the above realistic and theoretical background,this paper takes the inputprocess-output(IPO)model of strategic entrepreneurship proposed by Hitt et al.(2011).Based on resource dependence theory,geographic proximity theory,social proximity theory,strategic entrepreneurship theory,higher echelon theory,and the "environmentbehavior" research paradigm,this paper explores the following questions at the input,process,and output stages of strategic entrepreneurship:(1)Does geographic proximity and social proximity promote or inhibit strategic entrepreneurship?(2)How do executive traits mediate the relationship between proximity and strategic entrepreneurship?(3)How does environmental uncertainty play a moderating role between proximity and strategic entrepreneurship?(4)How does strategic entrepreneurship affect management performance,firm performance,and environmental performance?To answer the above research questions,four separate substudies were conducted to refine and extend the existing research.Substudy I focuses on the input phase of the strategic entrepreneurship IPO model.Resource-based theory suggests that organizations can barely achieve self-sufficiency for certain important strategic resources and must rely on other external organizations to supply them.In a rapidly changing business environment,companies often face challenges such as a lack of information,obsolete knowledge,and insufficient capital,and they cannot carry out strategic entrepreneurship on their own.On the one hand,neighboring organizations are the most reliable allies of a company and can bring strategic resources such as knowledge,information,and capital to the company,which in turn support the strategic entrepreneurial activities of the company.On the other hand,excessive proximity may result in spatial lock-in and redundant resources.Therefore,the first research question focuses on exploring whether the effect of proximity on strategic entrepreneurship is a facilitator or a disincentive.Substudy Ⅱ focuses on the process phase of the strategic entrepreneurship IPO model,where executives with different personality traits have different attitudes toward strategic entrepreneurship,and this attitude changes somewhat in the face of resource input from neighboring organizations.Among the many executive traits,a commonly accepted view among scholars is that overconfident executives prefer high risk and believe too much in their own abilities,while short-sighted executives avoid risky behaviors and prefer behaviors with short payoff cycles.Overconfident executives become more blindly confident when faced with a large amount of proximity resources and thus engage in exploratory and developmental activities.Short-sighted executives are somewhat relieved when faced with a large amount of resources in their neighborhood,but they still think more about how to use resources quickly to enhance short-term gains and prefer to report on short-cycle,low-risk developmental strategic ventures.Substudy Ⅲ continues to focus on the process phase of the strategic entrepreneurship IPO model and differs from the previous research question in that substudy Ⅲ focuses on the impact of external environmental uncertainty in the strategic entrepreneurship process.According to the "environment-behavior" research paradigm,companies are not islands,and the external environment in which they operate affects their internal decision making and operations.Neighboring organizations promote the strategic entrepreneurship of focus enterprises by transferring resources to focus enterprises.This process will be influenced by the external environment,the external turmoil or the stable and rich outside world,which determines whether enterprises are willing to use the resources of neighboring organizations for strategic entrepreneurship instead of other operational activities.Substudy Ⅳ focuses on the output phase of the strategic entrepreneurship IPO model and focuses on verifying the economic favorability of strategic entrepreneurship at different levels.Strategic management and entrepreneurial activities involve the creation of value and wealth,with entrepreneurial behavior contributing to the creation of value and wealth in the company,mainly by exploiting opportunities in the market,and strategic management contributing to value and wealth creation efforts,mainly by developing competitive advantages.Most previous studies have focused on the positive impact of strategic entrepreneurship on shareholder wealth,ignoring the beneficial aspects of strategic entrepreneurship for multiple stakeholders.The author implements the economically beneficial aspects of strategic entrepreneurship in individuals,organizations,and society into specific empirical data to empirically test the effects of strategic entrepreneurship on management performance,corporate performance,and environmental performance.Taken together,this study has the following marginal contributions.First,in terms of theoretical innovation,this paper extends the theoretical boundaries of geographic proximity and social proximity and applies geographic proximity and social proximity to the field of business management to solve the resource dilemma faced by firms in implementing strategic entrepreneurial behavior.In recent years,with the rise of geographic economics,geographical location characteristics have gradually attracted attention in the field of corporate strategy and corporate governance.Related scholars point out that geographic proximity can alleviate information asymmetry,reduce the cost of capital for firms,and improve the quality of financial reporting.Considering the advantages of geographic proximity in industrial research,the author innovatively extends geographic proximity to the firm level and theoretically derives and empirically verifies that geographic proximity organizations can help firms address the drawbacks of insufficient information and obsolete knowledge.In addition,the author found that although social proximity is not intuitive proximity,it can provide a very valuable resource for strategic entrepreneurship,some soft information and tacit knowledge based on mutual trust.Second,in terms of methodological innovation,this paper breaks the limitation of using primary data in previous papers related to strategic entrepreneurship.The accounting text information contained in the annual reports of listed companies is unstructured financial data with extremely rich connotations.With the development of computer language and machine learning techniques,scholars have started to use text analytics to batch process accounting text information in annual reports.Text analytics is a method that reflects the level of attention and importance of a topic by measuring how often it appears in the text of an annual report.This paper uses textual analysis to capture the frequency of key words in the "Business Overview" and "Management Discussion and Analysis" sections of the annual report that can reflect exploratory and developmental strategic entrepreneurship,which not only enables a large sample of all listed companies to be studied but also has time series properties for dynamic research.Finally,in terms of model innovation,this paper improves the strategic entrepreneurship IPO model proposed by Hitt et al.(2011)by clarifying the input sources of resources,adding the governance process of internal executives,enriching the governance process of the external environment,and extending the output range of economic benefits for the strategic entrepreneurial IPO model.Specifically,in the input stage,the author combines resource-based theory and proximity dynamics theory to propose that geographic proximity organizations and social proximity organizations can provide strategic resources such as knowledge and information to the firm,respectively.In the process phase,I analyze the process of strategic entrepreneurship by combining the higher echelon theory and the "environment-behavior" paradigm to provide insight into how firms handle resources.In the output phase,I translate the economic benefits of strategic entrepreneurship for individuals,organizations,and society into concrete empirical data and empirically test the impact of strategic entrepreneurship on management performance,firm performance,and environmental performance.