Research On The Influence Of Executives' Attention Stability On The Selection Of Diversified M&A Objects In Chinese Enterprises' Continuous Cross-border M&A

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions are an important part of the field of foreign direct investment.After the fifth wave of mergers and acquisitions,many Chinese enterprises have manifested the characteristics of multiple cross-border mergers and acquisitions,forming a continuous cross-border mergers and acquisitions behavior.After entering the 21 st century,more and more Chinese enterprises conduct international expansion in the form of continuous cross-border mergers and acquisitions.In order to achieve their strategic goals,enterprises will choose diversified mergers and acquisitions.At present,there is no unified answer to this key issue in the theoretical and practical fields.Especially,the relevant research on how Chinese enterprises make strategic choices of continuous cross-border mergers and acquisitions is not enough.The high-level echelon theory believes that the executive cognition is an important determinant of the strategic choice and performance of an enterprise.Based on the high-level echelon theory and the attention-based view,this paper introduces the "executive attention" to study the cross-border m&a behaviors of Chinese enterprises in the context of continuous cross-border m&a.As the decision-maker of corporate strategy,will the attention stability of senior executives affect the choice of diversified m&a objects by Chinese enterprises in continuous cross-border m&a? The influence of the attention stability of senior executives on the selection of diversified m&a objects will be affected by the resources and nature of enterprises themselves.Therefore,this paper further studies the moderating effect of organizational redundancy and enterprise ownership on the attention stability of senior executives and the selection of diversified m&a objects.Based on the high-level echelon theory and the basic view of corporate attention,this paper attempts to reveal the influence mechanism of executive attention stability on the selection of diversified m&a objects in the context of continuous cross-border m&a,and to give a new explanation for the internationalization behavior of Chinese enterprises.On the basis of literature review,this paper defines continuous enterprise transnational merger and acquisition for 10 years for more than 3 times and enterprise of transnational m&a,executives executives attention stability can be divided into the stability of the exploratory attention and use of the stability of the attention,and based on the principle of attention based view of the situation,to build the research model of this article,and puts forward three set of assumptions.In order to verify the hypothesis proposed,this paper took the full sample of Chinese enterprises with three or more consecutive cross-border mergers and acquisitions from 2007 to 2016 as the research sample,and obtained a total of 50 sample enterprises and 216 mergersand acquisitions events.Based on the empirical research on the acquired second-hand data,the following conclusions are finally drawn:First,in continuous cross-border mergers and acquisitions,the stability of executives' attention has an important impact on the selection of diversified mergers and acquisitions by enterprises.Specifically,the stability of exploratory attention is positively correlated with the selection of diversified mergers and acquisitions by enterprises.The stability of exploitive attention is negatively correlated with the choice of diversified m&a objects,that is,the higher the stability of exploitive attention of senior executives,the more inclined they are to non-diversified m&a.Second,the organization redundancy for executive attention stability and the choice of enterprise diversification m&a object plays a role of regulating the relationship among them,the negative regulating executive organization redundancy exploratory attention stability and the relationship between the object and the choice of enterprise diversification m&a,forward adjust executives use attention stability and the relationship between the object and the choice of enterprise diversification m&a;Third,enterprise ownership has an impact on the relationship between the attention stability of senior executives and the choice of diversified m&a objects.Enterprise ownership positively moderates the relationship between the stability of executives' attention and the choice of diversified m&a objects.This paper extend and supplement the relevant research of Chinese enterprises transnational mergers and acquisitions,executives will be attention to the research of continuous situation of transnational m&a,and executive attention stability is studied by using the method of empirical test on the selection of object of diversified mergers and acquisitions,not only enrich the theory of top echelon,to expand enterprise internationalization,continuous cross-border m&a to the Chinese enterprise the strategic choice in practice has important guiding significance.