Abstract

This study investigates the roles of management experience and management practices towards innovation activities across ASEAN nations. Notably, the moderating role of the female CEOs in the management experience management practices—innovation relationship is also examined. The data came from the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey, consisting of 180,000 enterprises worldwide. This study extracted data from seven economies in ASEAN (Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Laos, and Cambodia). To deal with the hierarchical/multilevel structure of the study’s data set, the study uses the multilevel mixed-effects ordered logit model. The findings reveal that both management practices and management experience have positive impacts on innovation activities, particularly product innovation. Furthermore, this paper highlights the positive moderating role of female CEOs in the management experience management practices—innovation relationship.

Introduction

There is growing research on firm innovation in all sectors as it is a vital determinant of a firm’s growth and performance. Notably, the Covid-19 pandemic generates huge challenges and turbulence, and worldwide firms have to try their best to survive. Millions of businesses have to redesign and reconsider many aspects such as their business model (Dovbischuk, Citation2022), management leadership, or supply chain management (Sarkis, Citation2020). Among those determinants of business resilience, the innovation capability is emphasized by extant literature (Cuel et al., Citation2022; Li et al., Citation2021; Xie et al., Citation2022) as it provides a series of new ideas and models to match with uncertainties flexibly.

Prior studies regarding firms’ innovation have focused on broad topics, including determinants of innovation and outcomes of innovation. In the first line, scholars have found many determinants of innovation, consisting of inbound and outbound factors. The inbound factors include leadership, capabilities, firm structure, knowledge management, and gender diversity. On the other hand, the second line focuses on the results of innovation. Innovation is a fundamental driver of sustainable development and the survival and success of businesses (He & Shen, Citation2019; Zhong et al., Citation2021). Porter (Citation1992) and Solow (Citation1957) both emphasized how innovation is frequently seen as the most important factor in determining an economy’s competitiveness.

Results

Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics. There are nearly 7% of firms conducting “Innovation but only new the firm”, and more than 14% of firms had “Innovation and new to the market”. Nearly 18% of firms performed new management practices. The average management experience is nearly 18 years. Moreover, 30% of firms have female CEOs.

Table 2 reports the pairwise correlations. The pairwise correlation coefficients between independent and control variables are lower than 0.5, suggesting that there are no signals of multicollinearity (Dormann et al., 2013).

Table 3 presents the multilevel mixed-effects ordered logit estimation results. Regarding the hierarchical data issue, the likelihood-ratio tests comparing the multilevel mixed-effects ordered logit with standard ordered logit regression are reported in each model. It is interesting to find that the likelihood-ratio test statistics are statistically significant in all models. Therefore, the multilevel mixed-effects ordered logit is preferred to the standard ordered logit regression in estimating this specific data set.