A Sociocultural Imprinting Journey from Intrinsic to Extrinsic Incentives:

The Impact of CEO cultural Origin on Firm Wining and Dining 

Time: December 26, 2019 (Thursday), 12:30-14:00

Location: Zhifuxuan Conference Room, National School of Development, Peking U.

Speaker: Prof. Yang, Associate Professor in the Department of Management of Lingnan University Hong Kong.

Abstract:

Conditions around one’s birth have been argued to could have material consequences during adulthood, including cultural differences that are costly and can impair firm performance. This paper affirms and advances this stream of studies such relatively very limited but rigorous and growing studies in leading journals by examining how the cultural origin in a CEO’s birthplace could lead to cultural differences with far-ranging implications. Specifically, exploiting the cultural differences of rice and wheat farming behind CEO birthplace in China, we show how they could lead to differences in entertainment and travel costs (ETC) spending as well as shareholder values, especially when collectivist rice CEOs manage firms in individualist wheat regions. We thus identify show how intrinsic early value system in people’s culture cultural origin of birthplace can influence firms’ use of ETC as extrinsic incentives to manage cultural differences. Our findings are robust following a battery of control variables and tests including when we focus on firms located along rice-wheat border, change in CEOs, and anti-extravagance event in 2012.

Bio

Prof. Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management of Lingnan University Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. in Strategic Management from University of Washington, Seattle USA; and her Bachelor Degree in Economics from Peking University, China. Prior to joining Lingnan, she taught at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include firm innovation, entrepreneurship, new ventures, managerial risk-taking, knowledge spillovers, organizational learning, firm strategies in emerging economy. Her scholarly works have appeared in leading academic journals in the management field, such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Research Policy, Management Organization Review, Human Resource Management and Academy of Management Conference Best Paper Proceedings. She has taught Business Strategy and Entrepreneurship courses to the undergraduate, MBA, and DBA programs in both Hong Kong and Mainland China.