I’ve Got the Power! Chief Strategy Officer’s Influence Within the Firm

We build on intraorganizational power literature to study the influence of the chief strategy officer (CSO) within organizations. We argue that the CSO's individual characteristics - structural power, expert power, and prestige power - as well as institutional forces of the firm's environment - cultural power distance and industry power level - affect the extent of the CSO's actual power over a broad range of strategic decisions. Further, we hypothesize that the CSO's actual power is positively associated with firm performance. An analysis of survey and archival data of 104 European firms reveals that the host country's cultural power distance and the industry's power level, however, not the CSO's individual characteristics, determine the CSO's actual power within the firm. Moreover, we find that firms benefit from powerful CSOs.