From Outsider To Insider: A Case Study Of Anticipatory Socialization And Its Impact On Role Expectation And Transition Of An Outside CEO

Abstract

The number of CEO successions is on the rise. Despite its importance to business scholars, what underlies successful or failed successions is not well understood. This paper examines this topic by looking at an under researched area of CEO transitions, the socialization process of an outsider CEO into a new organization and how this process may impact role expectation and transition into an organization.  As an initial qualitative and exploratory piece, the goal of this paper is two-fold. First, this paper looks at how a CEO engages in the socialization process into a firm and its broader implications in a leader’s willingness to identify with an organization. Second, this paper proposes a potential model that can be applied to explain this process for future research and application to other CEO succession studies.