Do sole actual controllers really inhibit corporate innovation? The nonlinear moderating effect of cooperative culture

Purpose 1. Explore the important role of sole actual controller in the innovation decision of the firm and the different effects of the ownership of sole actual controller on innovation; 2. Explore whether the role played by sole actual controllers varies in different types of firms; 3. Explore the important role of cooperative culture in the internal governance of firms and whether sole actual controller firms feel a rejection effect on cooperative culture. Design/methodology/approach The authors collect data on Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2021 to analyze the role of the sole actual controller on innovation investment, as well as the moderating effect of cooperative culture in corporate annual reports using natural language processing. Findings The authors find that sole actual controllers promote corporate innovation investment and that concentrated equity inhibits corporate innovation investment, while dispersed equity concentration promotes it. In addition, cooperative culture has a nonlinear moderating effect on the relationship between SACs and innovation. Research limitations/implications On the one hand, this study focuses chiefly on the decision-making behavior of top managers, such as the SACs and shareholders, and does not account for the role of bottom-level employees or professional R&D teams in innovation. On the other hand, although this study discusses the moderating role of corporate cooperative culture, it is limited to internal cooperative culture; cooperative culture should also consider external cooperation, such as cooperation between companies or between companies and universities. Practical implications First, companies should actively implement the SAC model and scientifically select a truly compassionate and visionary SAC as the dominant person in the company. Second, the Chinese government needs to standardize the identification of actual controllers, who should not be a shareholder of the company. Third, policymakers should promote the reform of the mixed system of enterprises, optimize the shareholding structure of firms, make executives an important part of corporate governance. Fourth, cooperation culture is a good start, though firms should avoid letting it become a “double-edged sword” of the management mode of the SAC. Originality/value First, existing studies do not address the impact of SACs on innovation from the perspective of SACs, who have most influence the firm's decision-making. Focusing on the SAC's decision-making style has sufficient practical implications for future corporate innovation planning. This study used the natural language processing (NLP) module in ChatGPT to analyze the culture of cooperation in corporate annual reports. Currently, corporate culture is an obstacle to the study of corporate governance because of its obscurity and difficulty of quantification. The authors adopted a PSM (propensity score matching) approach to eliminate the endogeneity of the data, which makes the results more scientific.