关键词: 聚类分析, 高管断裂带, 内部控制, 市场化程度

Abstract: Improving the quality of enterprise internal control and preventing internal control crisis is one of the hot spots in the fiscal field under the background of current financial governance. Cluster analysis is applied to calculate the faultlines of the top management team in listed companies and investigate its impact on the quality of internal control. The results show that the faultlines of the top management team is significantly negatively correlated with the quality of internal control, and the increase of the micro-level executive ownership within the company aggravates the negative correlation between the two, reflecting the “entrenched effect” of the management, while the improvement of the degree of marketization at the external macro level where the company is located alleviates the negative correlation between the two. The mechanism is that the faultlines of the top management team reduces the quality of internal control by inhibiting the discussion and analysis of internal control. A further decomposition of the types of faultlines of the top management team indicates that the faultlines formed by deep-level attributes has a greater impact on the quality of internal control than that of the surface-level attributes ones. This paper enriches the application of the faultlines theory and the connotation of the influencing factors of internal control quality, and has a certain theoretical and practical significance on improvement of the internal control quality of enterprises and avoidance of non-systematic risks.

Key words: cluster analysis, faultlines of the top management team, internal control, marketization degree