Abstract

Importance of the directors is that they are developing and monitoring corporate strategy business elite, the cultivation of competitive advantage and maximize stakeholder value are inseparable from an elite board of directors. In particular, a number of board seats, the people we call the chain director of corporate strategy formulation has a special role. Rooted in the Western developed countries, research director of the chain for almost a century. Chain embedded in a corporate director makes the dissemination of business knowledge and practical system, in which the director has more chain businesses more prone to innovation, the occurrence of strategic imitation, establishing alliances between enterprises and the promotion of enterprise access to external resources. Today, in China's transition economy, the phenomenon of interlocking directorates is also very popular, because the linkage between corporate directors and the formation of a close business networks, interlocking directorates through the influence and shape the firm's strategic choices affect the whole economic system. Because the characteristics of the economies in transition, the chain's director of corporate strategy is bound to be from the influence of boundary conditions at different levels, constraints, issues related to study conditions in the transition economies are becoming increasingly important. When we look at the board of directors in the listed companies, we surprisingly find that a board of director can sit on multiple board seats of corporations. These multiple directors are important, because they are the business elites who formulate and monitor firm strategic decisions, and firm competitive advantages and the maximization of stakeholder values ​​are contingent on these director roles. These arguments have already been proved by the voluminous studies in the western countries. Specifically, those multiple directors as called interlocking directorates have significant impact on corporate strategies. Nearly one century research on interlocking directorates has found that interlocking directorates make firms embedded within a contagious network consisting important business knowledge and practices. Those who have more interlocking directorates are more likely to innovate, imitate others, form interfirm alliances, and help firm seeking essential resources. Today, the interlocking directorate has become a prevalent phenomenon in China's transition economy. Public-listed firms have formed a cohesive interlock network via interlocking directorates. Under this condition, interlocking directorates may exert important influence on firm strategy which may help shape the performance of the whole economic system. However, because of the uniqueness of institutional transitions, the effect of interlocking directorates on firm strategy will be contingent on different boundary conditions rooted in the transitional context