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This chapter investigates whether core competence of managers and their expansive (vs. specialized) managerial style affects firms' innovative ability, capacity, and efficiency. Using exogenous CEO departures as a natural experiment, it establishes a causal link between managerial capability and innovation. Importantly, it reveals that firms with talented managers receive significantly more nonself citations; make significantly lower self-citations and lesser citations to the others, indicating novel and explorative innovation achievements. Also, managers with higher general (specialized) ability are cited more (less) by patents from a wider range of fields. Lastly, career concern is identified as a mechanism linking higher ability and innovation.

The M&A literature lacks coherence and consistency when explaining the role of CEO power in influencing post-acquisition firm performance in both theoretical and empirical terms. This study uses meta-analytic techniques to quantitatively synthesize and evaluate the impact of 11 CEO power constructs (CEO duality; compensation; ownership; founder CEO; acquisition experience; functional area experience; outside directorship; elite education; CEO celebrity; age; and tenure) on acquiring firms’ post-acquisition performance. Results of 85 independent studies show that CEO ownership, functional area experience, and tenure are significantly positive predictors for better acquisition performance. At the same time, CEO duality and CEO elite education are significantly negative predictors of different measures of acquisition performance. These findings indicate the importance of integrating different theories to enhance our understanding of the nature of strategic leadership in acquisition performance.

This study aims to analyze the effect of top management team (TMT) expertise on real earnings management (REM) and accrual earnings management (AEM) activities in companies in Indonesia by examining a hand-collected secondary data from non-financial publicly listed companies in Indonesia in 2016 and 2017. The expertise of TMT members is measured by possession of a master’s degree, understanding and experience of managed core functional areas, and possession of accounting certifications such as CA or CPA. The results of the study show that the expertise of the members of the TMT has no influence on the activity of AEM in companies in Indonesia. Meanwhile, understanding and experience on the managed core functional areas have a positive influence on REM activities through abnormal cash flows. Possession of accounting certification has a positive influence on REM activities in companies that are in accordance with managerial entrenchment effects, as well as a negative influence on REM activities in companies through abnormal discretionary expenses that are in line with incentive-reduction effects.

In this chapter, we focus on expatriate CEOs who are assigned by the parent company to work in a subsidiary and compare them to those who themselves have initiated to work abroad as CEOs. Since we do not know much about these individuals, we direct our attention to: (1) who they are (demographics), (2) what they are like (personality), and (3) how they perform (job performance).

Data was sought from 93 assigned expatriate CEOs and 94 self-initiated expatriate CEOs in China.

Our findings demonstrate that in terms of demography, self-initiated CEOs were more experienced than assigned CEOs. With regard to personality, we found difference in self-control and dispositional anger: Assigned expatriate CEOs had more self-control and less angry temperament than their self-initiated counterparts. Finally, we found assigned expatriate CEOs to rate their job performance higher than self-initiated CEOs.

Although there may not always be immediate benefits, career consideration often plays a role when individuals choose whether to become an expatriate. For many years, organizations have used expatriation to develop talented managers for high-level positions in the home country. Recently, however, a new trend has emerged. Talented top managers are no longer expatriated only from within parent companies to subsidiaries. Self-initiated expatriates with no prior affiliation in the parent company are increasingly used to fill top management positions in subsidiaries.

We study the events that motivate CEOs to underinvest in R&D long-term projects (CEO myopia). Based on the existing literature in earnings management and agency theory, myopia is likely to become more problematic under five circumstances: when the CEO nears retirement (the CEO horizon problem), R&D projects have very long time horizons (the project horizon problem), the firm’s financial health is deteriorating (the cover-up problem), ownership structure is heavily weighted toward insider owners (minority owner oppression problem), and when the threat of hostile takeover increases (the entrenchment problem). We setup a dynamic simulation model in which rational CEOs maximize the total value of their bonus compensation over their tenure. Our findings related to the five circumstances are consistent with the extant literature. However, we found an unexpected stable, nonlinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship between CEO tenure and R&D investment. We discuss the theoretical implications of our model and offer suggestions for future research.

In this article we consider how cultural resources rooted in religion help to constitute and animate people working in industrialized societies across both religious and nonreligious domains. We argue that redemptive self-narratives figure prominently in the symbolic constructions people attach to their experiences across the many domains of human experience; such redemptive narratives not only can shape their identities and sense of life purpose, they inform their practices and choices and animate their capacity for action. To consider how redemptive self-narratives can provide a basis for agency in organizations, we analyze and compare the career narratives of a retired Episcopal Bishop and a celebrated CEO.

While multinational companies develop meta-level policies to address grand sustainability challenges and CEOs are increasingly showing their social activism, the hard work of concretely defending communities’ rights and the environment from business exploitation is often left to powerless individuals, known as human rights defenders (here defenders), who face severe risks for their advocacy. According to some statistics, between 2015 and 2022, defenders worldwide have been subject to over 4,000 attacks, including killings, tortures, and intimidation. In this chapter, the authors discuss the relevance of defenders to the promotion of the sustainable development goal (SDG) agenda and develop a conceptual model to predict CEOs’ reactions to defenders.