earticle

영어

As the world’s largest developing country, China faces a great challenge in poverty alleviation. The Chinese government is exploring a unique means of poverty reduction, in which enterprises play important roles. Scholars have probed the antecedents of firms’ targeted poverty alleviation strategies from the perspectives of top management team (TMT) characteristics, organizational features and the external environment, but few of them explored the triggering effect of key organizational events. Chief executive officer (CEO) awards are one of the meaningful events that cannot be ignored to determine a firm’s organizational strategy. In view of this, we aim to discuss the effect of CEO awards on firms’ targeted poverty alleviation strategies. By utilizing data from Chinese listed companies, we find the following conclusions: CEO awards improve firms’ motivation to engage in targeted poverty alleviation strategies. In an effort to maintain their reputation and status, award-winning CEOs pay greater attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and are more willing to make higher investments in corporate targeted poverty alleviation strategies. Further, the relationship between CEO awards and a firm’s targeted poverty alleviation strategy is affected by the firm’s external institutional environment, which includes formal as well as informal institutions. For formal institutions, the regional marketization level influences how CEOs impact their firm’s targeted poverty alleviation; specifically, compared to areas with low marketization, the positive effect of CEO awards on the firms’ targeted poverty alleviation is weaker in areas with high marketization levels. For informal institutions, regional Confucian culture is a key factor, and it should be taken into account. Compared with areas with weak Confucian culture, the positive effect of CEO awards on targeted poverty alleviation is stronger in areas with strong Confucian culture. In this paper, CEO award events are taken as a focus and the impact of CEO award events on a firm’s corporate poverty alleviation strategy is analyzed, which not only enriches the study of targeted poverty alleviation strategies but also expands the applicability of event trigger mechanisms in the field of organizational strategic decision-making.