Author(s): Muluken Ayalew, Chalchisa Amentie
This review study intended to answer three basic research questions on corporate diversification these are: the first, how the research investigated the antecedents of corporate diversification in the past decade? The second question is how the research examined the outcomes of corporate diversification in the past decade? And the third is how the research investigated the moderators and mediators of corporate diversification in the past decade? The study used a systematic review strategy, particularly using PRISMA 2020 protocol, to address the above questions. In this respect, clear inclusion and exclusion criteria were employed to select 58 relevant articles from the total of 1605 corporate diversification articles obtained from various databases, for the analysis purpose. Other research methods were also used in the study, such as the collected data were analyzed via content analysis, and finally presented descriptively using descriptive research design. The finding shows that there is a shortage of demographic characteristics-related antecedents of corporate diversification such as the leader’s gender and experience, and its moderators and mediators.And also, the finding revealed that the non-financial performance outcome of corporate diversification is the most neglected and under-researched area, in the existing literature. It is recommended that future studies focus on investigating how a leader’s gender and experience predict corporate diversification, and also, suggested examining corporate diversification-performance relationship using potential moderating and mediating variables. Lastly, it is advised to address the basic question in relation to corporate diversification outcome i.e. “Why are corporate diversification researchers only focusing on the financial aspects of firms?”