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Change of leadership is a big and important incident in the life of a company. As important as it is for the company, it is equally a difficult decision to make for the board of directors. Most of the big companies have a committee dedicated toward laying out a succession plan of the existing chief executive officer (CEO). The big dilemma, however, is whether to appoint someone from within the company and let him or her lead as he or she has been associated with the company and knows the internal dynamics better or to induct some outsider and take advantage of his or her expertise/reputation in the market. The balance appears lopsided when the result of this chapter is perused. Companies on an average seem to reap more benefits if an existing executive is promoted to the office of CEO rather than hiring an outsider. The benefits which are talked here from promoting insiders are indirect ones and do not have a direct bearing with the finances of the company. As shown by the results that insiders are more likely to continue with the company for a longer duration as the CEO as well as not as the CEO which defers the hiring and firing costs (screening candidates, conducting interviews, huge severance packages, golden parachutes, etc., are the costs referred to) for a longer period. Other benefits arising from insider CEOs are upfront awareness about the company’s work culture, production/service capacity, efficiency, strategies followed till date, etc., which gives him or her a head start compared to an outsider.

This study investigates the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on performance related turnover. Our results indicate that smaller boards and institutional block holders are positively related to the likelihood of performance related turnover. CEOs that also hold the position of the chairman of the board or belong to a founding family face lower likelihood of turnover. CEO stock ownership is negatively related to turnover and CEOs who own 3 percent or more of their company stock face a significantly lower likelihood of performance related turnover. Moreover, protection from external control market has no effect either on the likelihood of turnover.

This study aims to examine the impact of a chief executive officer (CEO) social network centrality on corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance.

This study carries out a multivariate linear regression analysis on a panel data sample of 11,507 firm-year observations (representing 1,386 unique US firms) from 2004 to 2014.

This paper finds a significant negative relation between CEO network centrality and irresponsible CSR performance (measured as CSR concerns). The findings suggest that better-connected CEOs can better mitigate CSR concerns or weaknesses, leading to improved overall CSR performance of a firm.

This is the first study that directly examines the empirical link between CEO centrality and CSR performance.

This study aims to answer two unique related questions on the overarching relationship between a CEO’s personal religious affiliation, the firm’s advertising spending decision and its shareholder value. First, does the CEO’s religious affiliation, a proxy for risk taking, influence the firm’s advertising spending decision? Second, does the advertising spending decision mediate the relationship between the CEO’s religious affiliation and the firm’s shareholder value?

This study uses data on the religious affiliations of CEOs of publicly listed US firms, 1992–2014, from Marquis Who’s Who; advertising spending and shareholder value from Compustat, and panel data-based regression models including CEO characteristics from ExecuComp, and firm-, industry- and time-based controls.

We find higher advertising spending levels for Protestant over Catholic-led firms, and advertising spending mediates the relationship between a CEO’s religious affiliation and the firm’s shareholder value.

Marketing theory needs to incorporate the missing but fundamental effect of the CEO’s religious affiliation-based values on decisions and outcomes.

Boards of Directors may need to align the CEO’s and their firm’s spending goals.

While previous studies focused on the influence of religious affiliation on consumers’ attitudes and behavior, and executives’ financial and R&D spending decisions, this study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first to investigate the effect of a CEO’s religious affiliation on the firm’s advertising spending decision and its shareholder value.

Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting highlights an increasing lack of transparency in the information reported along with concerns surrounding overall reporting practices. One area that needs exploration is how chief executive officers (CEOs) convey messages in relation to CSR. This paper aims to investigate the linkage between CEO’s statements (words and images) in relation to CSR and the performativity of such communication.

The study analysed CEOs statements from five Malaysian companies contained in 2016, 2017 and 2018 standalone sustainability and annual reports. The texts and visuals are analysed by using discourse analysis.

The findings uncover three main discourses (economic, environmental and social) along with other discourses (achievements and recognition and challenges). The texts and images are found to be lacking in clarity and consistency and in many ways leave the stakeholders to make their own conclusions about the reported information.

The research indicates that while the leaders can be more direct to their stakeholders, however, the opportunity is not always capitalised. Overall, the analysis suggests an increasing scientism in CEOs messaging in relation to CSR as a tool to enhance perceived accountability of the business. The study also suggests avenues for improvement. This paper contributes to the emergence of different types of discourses that are being upheld by CEOs in their statements on CSR in Malaysian context. The discourses identified provide interesting insights into how CSR is perceived by the leaders.

The authors examine the association between internal control quality (ICQ) and voluntary disclosure and test whether chief executive officer (CEO) duality, as a proxy for CEO structural power, moderates such a relationship in an emerging market (Egypt).

ICQ is measured using a survey of external auditors, while a content analysis approach is used to measure the level of voluntary disclosure in annual reports.

Based on a sample of 512 firm-year observations over the period of 2007–2014, the authors document that ICQ is positively and significantly associated with voluntary disclosure, suggesting that better controls improve corporate reporting policy. In addition, CEO duality moderates the association between ICQ and voluntary disclosure since this positive relationship association becomes insignificant for companies characterised by CEO duality. These results remain stable after controlling for endogeneity (self-selection problem), political instability and industry characteristics.

The findings of the study provide preliminary evidence on the association between ICQ and voluntary disclosure, and how CEO structural power may affect this association. Future empirical investigations may extend this work to cover the relationship between ICQ and other attributes of corporate transparency including earnings quality and accounting conservatism.

The findings highlight the need for Egyptian regulators to enact new rules obliging firms to communicate information about ICQ or charging auditors to report information about firm's ICQ in their reports. The results also alert policymakers about the adverse effect of combined leadership structure (CEO duality) since it mitigates the positive impact of ICQ on voluntary disclosure.

The authors contribute to internal control literature by exploring the association between ICQ and voluntary disclosure on an emergent unregulated market with respect to internal control disclosure. They also highlight how CEO duality, as a proxy for CEO power, mitigates the beneficial effect of ICQ on corporate reporting policy on the Egyptian stock exchange (EGX).

Chief executive officers (CEOs) are increasingly seen as change agents for gender equality, which means that CEOs have to lead others to achieve gender equality. Much of this leadership is going to happen through talk, which raises the question as to how CEOs talk about gender equality to act as change agents. The purpose of this paper is to understand the arguments of CEOs deploy.

Drawing on interviews with global CEOs, who have publicly supported gender equality work, the article draws on discourse analysis to understand the arguments of CEOs deploy.

The analysis shows that CEOs deploy three arguments. First, CEOs argue that women bring special skills to the workplace, which contributes to a female advantage. Second, CEOs argue that the best person for the job is hired. Third, CEOs talk about how biases and privilege permeate the workplace. The analysis shows that CEOs are often invested in essentialised views of gender while holding onto ideals of meritocracy.

The article suggests that how leaders talk about gender equality leads to continuity, rather than change in regard to gender equality.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of financial and technical education of chief executive officer (CEO) on investment–cash flow sensitivity (ICFS) of Indian manufacturing firms.

The study uses the dynamic panel data model and more specifically, the system-generalized method of moments (GMM) technique to investigate the effect of CEOs' education on ICFS of Indian manufacturing firms during the period 1998–1999 to 2016–2017.

The study shows that financial (technical) education of CEOs does (not) affect ICFS. The results explain that the role of the CEO's education in ICFS is highly significant during the crisis period. The robustness test depicts that the influence of financial education on ICFS is less (more) for group-affiliated and large-sized firms (stand-alone and small-sized firms). Further, the CEO's education is significantly associated with corporate investment decisions.

Due to the unavailability of the CEO's compensation data for the selected sample, future research could explore the impact of CEO's education with respect to CEO's compensation on ICFS.

First, the authors find that financially educated CEOs affect ICFS; therefore, firms should take care of CEO's education during recruitment of CEOs. Second, lending agencies should also consider the educational background of the CEO before approval of funding to make it safe. Third, investors should keep in mind the educational background of the CEO for the growth of their investment as it may be easier for financially educated CEOs to borrow from the market at the time of requirement.

This study contributes to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence through analyzing the impact of a CEO's education on ICFS in the context of India. This study is very unique in itself as it uses the sample of manufacturing sectors of India, which are growing very fast and attracting global investors to create a global hub of manufacturing in India. This study also considers different types of education such as financial and technical education of CEOs in the context of a developing economy like India. This study made its findings robust across company characteristics and periods based on the financial crisis.

Innovation has been identified as a critical element to achieve firms' growth. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) passion on firm innovation, including exploratory and exploitative innovation and examine the moderating roles of market and technological turbulence.

This study adopts the methodology of survey and uses multisource and time-lagged data of 146 firms in China. Seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) is used to test the hypotheses of this study.

This study finds that CEO passion promotes exploratory and exploitative innovation. Results also indicate that market turbulence strengthens the effect of CEO passion on exploratory and exploitative innovation, whereas technological turbulence weakens such an effect.

CEO passion is an important, positive affect which inspires CEOs to work for firms, but it has not yet received enough attention in the innovation literature. This study contributes to examining the impact of CEO passion on firm innovation and contributes to the contingency under which CEO passion influences firm innovation. Furthermore, this research finds that the moderating effects of market and technological turbulence are different in the relationship between CEO passion and firm innovation.