Performance feedback and firms' relative strategic emphasis: The moderating effects of board independence and media coverage

This study investigates how performance feedback--the discrepancy between aspiration and actual performance--relates to firms' relative strategic emphasis on value-creation (VC) versus value-appropriation (VA). With a sample of 7460 firm-year observations collected from 1558 publicly-listed Chinese companies during 2011-2017, we find that negative performance feedback boosts firms' relative strategic emphasis on VC versus VA, while positive performance feedback has an inverted U-shaped effect. Explicitly, a low to medium level of positive performance feedback increases firms' relative emphasis on VC, while a medium to high level of positive feedback decreases it. We find that two monitoring mechanisms-board independence and media coverage-moderate these influences. Specifically, board independence weakens the boosting effect of negative performance feedback and strengthens the inverted U-shaped effect of positive performance feedback; media coverage strengthens the boosting effect of negative performance feedback and weakens the inverted U-shaped effect of positive performance feedback.