How Enterprise Systems Enable Strategic Change by Incoming CEOs Under Varied Loci of Complexity

Enterprise systems play a key role in the execution of firm strategies. A critical strategic choice a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) makes is of strategic change or strategic persistence, which are defined as change or stability over time in a firm’s pattern of resource allocation in key strategic dimensions, respectively. In this study, we maintain that enterprise systems can enable or constrain an incoming insider or outsider CEO in implementing strategic change or persistence in the presence of environmental complexity, strategic complexity, and operational complexity. Accordingly, we adopt a configurational perspective accompanied by fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fs-QCA) to explicate complex nonlinear relationships among CEO succession, firm’s enterprise system extensiveness, and complexities residing at three loci. Ultimately, the multiple equifinal configurations from our study are used to generate theoretical configurational propositions for two types of CEOs namely the “Internal Complexity Warrior” and the “Digital Warrior” CEO.