Dr. Tang Wang, Assistant Professor

Department of Management, College of Business Administration, University of Central Florida, USA

Biography: Dr. Tang Wang specializes in entrepreneurship, venture capital, and business innovation across US and China. Currently, Dr. Tang Wang serves as assistant professor at University of Central Florida’s College of Business Administration. Prior to that, Dr. Tang Wang held the Charles C and John G. Gates Professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Michigan Tech’s School of Business and Economics. Dr. Tang Wang has strong and extensive relationship with businesses in various sectors in China including energy, food, e-commerce and software, real estate, and financial service. He currently holds visiting position in Beijing Normal University and Nanjing University. His work has been published in leading business and management journals such as Journal of Management, Journal of Business Venturing, and Journal of Product Innovation Management. Meanwhile, Dr. Tang Wang serves as the senior advisor of Honest Eagle (Shanghai), a fast-growing food manufacturing and distribution business specializing in high-end bakery and ice cream products. Dr. Tang Wang received his Ph.D. in entrepreneurship from H. W. Bloch School of Management at University of Missouri-Kansas City. He also holds master degree from the University of Science and Technology of China.

Topic: CEO Power and Strategic Choice: A China-US Comparison

Abstract: Extant studies on CEO power have mainly focused on the discretion-aspect of power and thus only considered how powerful CEOs can influence others according to their wills. The current research focuses on the attention-aspect of CEO power with respect to how the power shapes CEO’s attention and information processing pattern, which ultimately drive the structural and temporal focus of strategic choice. Our findings based on newly IPO companies drawn from China and US show that CEOs holding high power tend to favor high structural focus (narrow the focus of strategic choices). Meanwhile, powerful CEOs tend to experience less temporal focus (destabilize the focus of strategic choices over time). We have also demonstrated significant differences of the prediction between China and US due to the cultural differences in power distance and uncertainty avoidance.