Firms must allocate resources effectively to cope with uncertainty, which can manifest as a disruption and an opportunity. Although information technology (IT) is a means to cope with uncertainty, chief executive officers (CEOs) may not always support IT investments due to the risky nature of IT, especially when facing uncertain conditions. While prior research suggests that CEO long-term compensation positively incentivizes IT investments, little is known about how different loci of uncertainty impact this relationship. To address this research gap, we study how firm-specific uncertainty and competitive uncertainty shape the influence of CEO long-term compensation on a firm’s IT capital investment. Drawing on agency theory and prospect theory, we develop two hypotheses. First, we hypothesize that firm-specific uncertainty and competitive uncertainty positively moderate the influence of CEO long-term compensation on firm IT capital investment. Second, we hypothesize that competitive uncertainty has a stronger positive moderating effect than firm-specific uncertainty on the influence of CEO long-term compensation on firm IT capital investment. Our analysis of secondary longitudinal data from 2000 to 2007 of 357 public firms in the United States supports our hypotheses. In exploratory analyses, we found that CEO long-term compensation results in a higher risk-oriented dominant logic in the firm, particularly in conditions of firm-specific uncertainty and competitive uncertainty, with competitive uncertainty having a stronger positive moderating effect. These findings uncover risk-oriented dominant logic as a theoretical mechanism that explains how CEO long-term compensation positively influences firm IT capital investment in uncertain conditions. We also conducted exploratory analyses using a different secondary dataset of 286 U.S. public firms from 2004 to 2019 to consider firm investments in transformative IT applications and found support for our theory. This finding triangulates our results across different time periods and different types of IT investments. This study contributes to theory and practice by providing a nuanced understanding of boundary conditions surrounding CEO long-term compensation, and decisions CEOs make vis-à-vis IT capital investments.

中文翻译：

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不确定性如何影响 CEO 长期薪酬对信息技术资本投资的影响


企业必须有效地分配资源来应对不确定性，这既可以表现为破坏，也可以表现为机遇。尽管信息技术 (IT) 是应对不确定性的一种手段，但由于 IT 的风险性质，首席执行官 (CEO) 可能并不总是支持 IT 投资，尤其是在面临不确定条件时。虽然之前的研究表明首席执行官的长期薪酬可以积极激励 IT 投资，但人们对不同的不确定性如何影响这种关系知之甚少。为了弥补这一研究空白，我们研究了公司特定的不确定性和竞争不确定性如何影响 CEO 长期薪酬对公司 IT 资本投资的影响。借鉴代理理论和前景理论，我们提出了两个假设。首先，我们假设公司特定的不确定性和竞争不确定性正向调节 CEO 长期薪酬对公司 IT 资本投资的影响。其次，我们假设竞争不确定性对 CEO 长期薪酬对企业 IT 资本投资的影响比企业特定的不确定性具有更强的正向调节作用。我们对 2000 年至 2007 年美国 357 家上市公司的二级纵向数据进行的分析支持了我们的假设。在探索性分析中，我们发现CEO长期薪酬导致公司风险导向的主导逻辑较高，特别是在公司特定不确定性和竞争不确定性的情况下，竞争不确定性具有更强的正向调节作用。这些发现揭示了风险导向的主导逻辑作为一种理论机制，解释了 CEO 长期薪酬如何在不确定的条件下对公司 IT 资本投资产生积极影响。 我们还使用 2004 年至 2019 年 286 家美国上市公司的不同二级数据集进行了探索性分析，以考虑公司对变革性 IT 应用程序的投资，并为我们的理论找到了支持。这一发现对我们不同时期和不同类型的 IT 投资的结果进行了三角测量。这项研究通过对 CEO 长期薪酬的边界条件以及 CEO 对 IT 资本投资做出的决策提供细致入微的了解，对理论和实践做出了贡献。