Executive succession correlates with organizational restructuring, but the effect runs through what the new actor does, not the bare fact of turnover

The organizational-behavior literature documents a change in the deciding actor as a correlate of restructuring, while resisting the clean-trigger reading. Ren et al. (Heliyon, 2023, open access, directly fetched) state it plainly: "Changes in the CEO and the top management usually lead to changes in the company's capability to respond to environmental changes, disrupting the power structure within the organization and impacting the initiation and implementation of established strategies," and "CEO turnover inevitably triggers the re-composition of TMTs, leading to convergences and conflicts between different subgroups, changes in organizational strategic capabilities, and shifts in strategic objectives."

But the effect is conditional. Wangrow, Schepker & Barker (2022, Journal of General Management) frame the naive version as an open question: "While mandates for strategic change may accompany the selection of new Chief Executive Officer (CEOs), the broader set of leadership changes necessary for strategic change remains unclear" — their finding (at abstract-level access only) is that the broader effect is mediated by whether the new CEO also replaces the top management team, not by succession alone. [unverified-mechanism — abstract only]; full-text verification routed to question-verify-executive-succession-mediation-wangrow-2022.

So the mechanism runs through what the new actor does — replace the team, redirect strategy — rather than through the bare fact of turnover. This is a better-sourced, more careful angle on the succession-as-trigger idea already in the vault via claim-tushman-romanelli-1985-reorientation-exogenous-trigger (itself [unverified-mechanism]) and the CEO-succession finding correctly attributed in claim-punctuated-equilibrium-trigger-findings-belong-to-romanelli-tushman-1994. It directly informs the vault's hypothesis: if session/model onset is to work like succession, it is not the change of actor but what the fresh actor is told to do that would carry the effect — question-new-session-onset-as-rewiring-trigger. Cf. the endogenous counterpart claim-cognitive-conflict-prerequisite-for-restructuring and moc-schema-change-and-restructuring.