Executive Team Stability, Organizational Resilience, and Innovation Quality in SRDI Enterprises: the Moderating Role of Managerial Autonomy

As a key driver of technological advancement and economic resilience, improving the innovation quality of SRDI (Specialized, Refined, Differential, and Innovative) enterprises is crucial for China’s high-quality development. Based on data from 891 national and provincial “small giants” firms and other SRDI enterprises from 2013 to 2022, this study reveals that executive team stability significantly enhances the innovation quality of SRDI enterprises. Specifically, a stable executive team strengthens organizational resilience, enabling proactive problem prevention and fostering higher innovation quality. Furthermore, the relationship between executive team stability and innovation quality is moderated by managerial autonomy, which includes organizational autonomy, environmental autonomy, and special scenario autonomy. Among these, organizational autonomy and environmental autonomy exert a more pronounced moderating effect. This study addresses a gap in existing research by shifting the focus from individual executive traits to the collective traits of executive teams, thereby enriching theoretical and empirical research on the innovation quality of SRDI enterprises.