While intuitive claim and prior studies acknowledge the vital impact of executive leadership on organizational culture, the distinct roles of chairmen and CEOs in altering specific culture types remain underexplored. We address this gap by examining how leadership transitions—specifically chairman and CEO successions—affect changes in cultural orientations within the competing values framework. An advanced large language model-aided text analysis is developed and validated. Large-scale empirical analyses of 4,927 Chinese listed firms spanning 2012 to 2022 provide support for most of our hypotheses. It is found that a newly succeeded chairman is more strongly associated with negative changes in internally focused cultures than a newly succeeded CEO. In addition, chairmen succession had a greater relationship with positive changes toward externally focused cultures compared to CEO succession. Furthermore, the effects of leadership succession on organizational culture change are generally attenuated in local state-owned enterprises but not central state-owned enterprises. This study contributes by clarifying the differentiated effects of strategic leadership on organizational culture changes. The antibias measures of organizational culture also provide methodological references for enhancing the precision and scalability of cultural assessment. Practical implications for organizations navigating leadership successions and culture updates are discussed.
