The upper echelons theory provides a new perspective for this research, which holds that the cognitive foundation and values of the top management team, as the key subject of corporate strategic decision-making, have an important impact on the disruptive innovation behavior of enterprises. Meanwhile, environmental variables play an important role in the decision-making process of the top management team, and the important internal and external environmental factors that affect the innovation of enterprises are crucial for the discussion of the influence of the characteristics of the top management team on the disruptive innovation of the enterprise. However, the existing research on disruptive innovation focuses on the analysis of managers' personal characteristics and ignores the analysis of diverse characteristics composed of teams as a whole. In terms of research methods, few scholars use the QCA method to study the driving mode of corporate disruptive innovation from a micro perspective.
Aiming at the above problems, this paper collects the case data of disruptive innovation in 25 domestic Internet enterprises, and adopts the method of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to construct the configuration effect model between six influencing factors at the two levels of the top management team and organizational environment, and discusses the multiple driving factors and multiple equivalent paths of enterprises generating high-level disruptive innovation.
The results show that (1) the realization of high levels of disruptive innovation is the result of the joint action of multiple factors at the two levels of the top management team and organizational environment, and any single executive team characteristics or individual organizational environmental conditions are not necessary conditions for enterprises to produce high levels of disruptive innovation; (2) there are six paths for enterprises to have high-level disruptive innovation,and they reflect the multiple models that drive the high level of disruptive innovation in enterprises with different combinations of characteristics of top management teams in different organizational environments. Further comparative analysis of the six paths shows that high education level, high-risk preference, and high market competition intensity play a key role in promoting the process of enterprise disruptive innovation as the core conditions. Organizational inertia has become an important condition to drive enterprises to produce a high level of disruptive innovation, indicating that organizational inertia may not be a constraint hindering enterprise disruptive innovation.
From a micro perspective, this paper systematically analyzes the mode and mechanism of the characteristics of the top management team under the influence of the organizational environment to promote the high level of disruptive innovation of enterprises, which not only provides new perspectives and new ideas for the relevant research in the field of disruptive innovation, but also provides important practical value for enterprises to optimize the allocation of top management team members, improve the adaptability of the organizational environment, and realize the diversified development path of high-level disruptive innovation. In addition, the QCA method introduces research on the relationship between the top management team, the organizational environment and the level of disruptive innovation in enterprises, which not only breaks through the limitations of traditional standard statistical methods, but also provides a methodological reference for future research on complex innovation problems.