We draw on upper-echelons literature recognizing the important role of CEOs in firm strategy, including innovation, and research on CEO political ideology and executive discretion to explore the relationship between CEO political ideology and firm breakthrough inventions. We suggest that CEO liberalism is a double-edged sword and is positively associated with firm breakthrough inventions but also less-useful inventions. We suggest that these relationships are shaped by three different sources of executive discretion: CEO-TMT pay gap, institutional investors, and existing product-market competition. We find support for our hypotheses on a sample of 581 public firms using firms’ patenting and citation activities to capture inventions. We infuse a values, contingency-based perspective to work on CEO characteristics and firm breakthrough inventions, provide a more comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature of managerial discretion in setting or deviating firms on/from certain technological trajectories, and extend work on political ideology by showing the relevance of political ideology for explaining not just variations in firm internal resource allocation decisions, corporate activism, and entrepreneurship but also in the level and nature of inventions it produces.

中文翻译：

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突破？CEO 政治意识形态对公司创造力的不同影响


我们借鉴了认识到 CEO 在公司战略（包括创新）中的重要作用的上层文献，并借鉴了 CEO 政治意识形态和高管自由裁量权的研究，以探索 CEO 政治意识形态与公司突破性发明之间的关系。我们认为 CEO 自由主义是一把双刃剑，与坚定的突破性发明呈正相关，但也与不太有用的发明呈正相关。我们认为，这些关系是由三个不同的高管自由裁量权来源形成的：CEO-TMT 薪酬差距、机构投资者和现有的产品-市场竞争。我们在 581 家上市公司的样本中找到了对我们的假设的支持，这些公司使用公司的专利申请和引用活动来捕获发明。我们注入了一种价值观、基于权变的视角来研究 CEO 特征和公司的突破性发明，更全面地了解管理自由裁量权在设置或偏离某些技术轨迹时公司的多方面性质，并通过展示政治意识形态的相关性来扩展政治意识形态的工作，而不仅仅是解释公司内部资源分配决策的变化。 企业激进主义和企业家精神，以及它产生的发明的水平和性质。