Executive Attributes, Strategic Alignment Under Turbulence, and Performance: A Behavioral Extension of Ansoff's Strategic Success Hypothesis ( SSH )

ABSTRACT This study builds a behavioral bridge between Upper Echelons Theory and Ansoff's Strategic Success Hypothesis by examining whether CEO technical orientation and power concentration help explain why firms facing similar turbulence achieve different levels of strategic posture and, in turn, different performance outcomes. SSH explains why performance depends on fit among environmental turbulence, strategic aggressiveness, and capability responsiveness, yet it is less explicit about why comparable firms reach different strategic positions, while UET explains executive influence but often leaves the posture pathway to performance underspecified. Using a matched firm‐year panel of Nasdaq firms that combines strategic‐posture measures, hand‐coded CEO attributes, and performance outcomes, the study tests whether CEO technical orientation and power concentration are associated with strategic posture and whether strategic posture mediates their associations with operating and expectation‐based performance. The findings show that stronger strategic posture is positively associated with both outcomes, that the two executive attributes help explain which firms achieve stronger posture, and that bootstrap indirect effects support statistical mediation through X1, while the posture–performance gap is more informative about uneven conversion of alignment into cash‐flow performance than about a stable independent performance penalty.