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Accounting scandals and earnings management problems at large firms such as Global Crossing and Enron have resulted in lots of wealth loss not only to corporate investors but also led tremendous damage to societies. Hence, policymakers and academic researchers have started to explore mechanisms to prevent improprieties in financial reporting and further enhance firm value. Using data from United States (US)-listed companies between 2000 and 2018, this article explores the effect of ex-military executives on earnings quality, the role of financial analysts in their interplay and the firm value implication of earnings quality driven by ex-military executives.

This study employs a firm fixed-effects model to validate the main conjecture and adopts the weighted least squares, Granger causality analysis, instrumental variable approach, propensity score matching, entropy balancing approach and dynamic system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator to address robustness and endogeneity issues.

Authors reveal that companies run by ex-military senior executives exhibit lower levels of accruals-based and real earnings management than those without. The effect of management military leadership on constraining earnings management is more prominent for companies with low analyst coverage, suggesting that the military experience of executives could be a substitute for external monitoring. Authors also find that these ethical managers alleviate the negative impact of earnings management on firm value and that companies managed by these managers exhibit higher firm performance.

This study highlights the importance of the intrinsic motivation behind the effect of military experience on senior managers' personalities and offers essential stakeholder-related implications regarding the effect of military experience. The military experience of senior managers helps facilitate the attainment of broader corporate governance and economic objectives.

This article adds new insights to the literature on the role of managerial military experience in decision-making processes, financial reporting outcomes and firm performance by employing the upper echelons and imprinting theoretical perspectives.

This paper employs human resources (HR) analytics to investigate the pathways through which high-potential managers ascend to C-suite positions, and how different developmental paths influence turnover among executives.

By combining job analysis and competency assessment with sequence analysis, the authors utilize HR analytics to analyze the work experiences of 53 general managers spanning 57 years (n = 2,742), encompassing various roles, job requirements, and 20 executive competencies attached to over 1,000 positions.

This study's findings reveal three distinct developmental paths that lead to the C-suite, characterized by differences in the content, context, timing, and complexity of work experience. Furthermore, the authors identify that a more complex developmental path tends to reinforce executives' competency in self-awareness while inhibiting their development of technical competency, ultimately resulting in reduced executive turnover.

By employing HR analytics to analyze empirical data embedded in job and organizational contexts, this study sheds light on the critical role of timing and complexity of work experiences in executive development. It also offers practical implications for firms seeking to optimize their leadership pipeline and reduce executive turnover by leveraging HR analytics effectively.

The purpose of this study was to explore the phenomenon of leadership development as experienced by non-government organization (NGO) executive leaders in international agricultural development. Data were collected from twelve executive NGO leaders through in-depth interviews to understand the textural and structural essences of the participants’ lived experiences of leadership development. Findings indicated the integral role of mentoring in leadership development prior to obtaining an executive leadership role and supported the conceptual model inclusive of mentoring as a mediating factor of efficacious leadership development. The study provided implications and future research recommendations for executive leaders in international agricultural development, as well as for leadership educators and practitioners.

In the business and data analytics community, intuition has not been discussed widely in terms of its application to executive decision-making. However, the purpose of this paper is to focus on new global research that combines intuition, trust and analytics in terms of how well C-level executives trust their intuition.

Our Fulbright research, as described in this paper and performed by colleagues from the United States, Canada, Poland and Italy, examines executives’ as well as other less experienced employees’ preferences for different types of intuition versus data analysis. This study set out to better understand the degree to which executives prefer intuition versus analysis and the relationship between these approaches to decision-making. Our research combines elements of a review, a cross-cultural/cross-company survey study and a biometrics study in interoception. The research team has a multidisciplinary background in business, information technology, strategy, trust management, statistics and neuroscience.

Based on our research, the main findings are as follows. The use of and preference for intuition types change as employees gain more experience. However, there may be intuition styles that are more static and trait-like, which are linked to roles, differentiating managers from leaders. Using “inferential intuition” and “seeing the big picture” go hand in hand. Listening to your body signals can promote improved intuition. Cross-cultural differences may impact executive decision-making. Executives often prefer to use their intuition over analysis/analytics.

This research could be expanded to have a larger sample size of C-level executives. We had 172 responses with 65% C-level executives and 12% directors. However, a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit on intuition used by executives had a sample of 174 executives around the world, which is comparable with our sample size.

From our research, executives should continue to apply their experiential learning through intuition to complement their use of data in making strategic decisions. We have often discounted the use of intuition in executive decision-making, but our research highlights the importance of making it a critical part of the executive decision-making process.

Based on the results of our survey and biometrics research, executives apply their intuition to gain greater confidence in their decision-making. Listening to their body signals can also improve their intuitive executive awareness. This complements their use of data and analytics when making executive decisions.

There has long been a fascination about what Chief Executives do. It is well recognised that they have considerable influence and power and live what most people assume are fast and exciting lives. Their decisions influence the lives of most of us as today the majority of people work in some form of organisation.

In today's turbulent business environment leaders must be able to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. For this research the authors aim to focus on the issue of adaptability defined as the ability to work effectively within a variety of changing situations, and with various individuals or groups. They also aimed to examine how variables of career complexity affect development of adaptability.

The authors draw on a unique database containing the career histories of 52 senior executives in a major global corporation. They use the term career complexity to represent the degree of variety in these individuals' career experiences, and they test the degree to which career complexity contributes to the development of adaptability later in their careers.

Findings from this study shed light on the relationship between specific career experiences and executive adaptability. Executives who had the experience to serve in an executive assistant role developed higher levels of adaptability. For executives without the executive assistant opportunity, job rotations through different types of roles provided a boost to their adaptability. Three role type changes (e.g. line, staff, or matrix) is optimal; 100 months is an optimal time to spend in each role type.

While the field of leadership development has generated substantial insight into the competencies required by executives, there are few models and empirical studies that describe the process of how specific competencies are developed. The authors' study highlighted the utility of the career complexity construct for both prospective understanding of career actions and processes and retrospective understanding of paths, patterns, and outcomes. The authors demonstrated the predictive value of the career complexity construct by presenting results of the statistical analyses of the hypothesized relationships between career complexity and career outcomes.

With the aim of shedding new light on the characteristics of human capital in its relationship with organizational innovation, this paper develops a novel theoretical and empirical exploration of the characteristics of human capital, both executives' experience and employees' average education level, as well as the moderating effect of female ownership, on two different aspects of organizational innovation.

Data were obtained from the World Bank's China private manufacturing enterprise questionnaire survey. The study employs regression analysis of a logistic model using 1,598 samples, because the dependent variable of an organization's innovation index is a binary variable.

Using World Bank survey data of Chinese private manufacturing enterprises, the authors find that executives' experience has a significantly positive effect on process innovation. Female ownership strengthens the relationship between executives' experience and process innovation. Moreover, the results indicate that employees' average educational level has a significantly positive effect on product innovation. Female ownership strengthens the relationships between employees' average educational level and organizational innovation including product innovation and process innovation. This study highlights the importance of simultaneously testing the effects of human capital and gender heterogeneity on organizational innovation activities.

This study explores the impact of human capital on organizational innovation activities in the context of the Chinese manufacturing industry. Moreover, organizational innovation activities are divided into two aspects: product innovation and process innovation. This study separately discusses the effect of human capital on these two kinds of innovation in detail. Finally, female ownership is selected as a moderating variable, and it is demonstrated that interactions of female owners with executives' experience and employees' average educational level have a positive impact on increasing different kinds of organizational innovation. The authors identify new boundary conditions for the domain of female research that are sorely lacking in the present literature.

Integrating social network theory with signaling theory, the purpose of this research is to examine the impact of corporate political connections and executive’s international experience on Chinese firms initial public offerings (IPOs) performance in the USA.

This study used Securities Data Company (SDC) New Issues database to identify all Chinese firms that went public in the USA between 2003 and 2014. Consistent with previous research, IPO firms excluded from the sample include merger or acquisitions, spin-offs and initial stage listed firms. The final sample size is of 142 Chinese foreign IPOs in the US markets.

This study finds that firms with political connections perform significantly poor than firms without political connections. It shows that US stock markets react to the signals of political connections of Chinese foreign IPOs. In response, the Chinese foreign IPOs can signal international work experience of top executives to US investors. The results show that the executives’ international work experience has significant positive relationships on foreign IPO performance of Chinese firms. Moreover, this study finds that the interaction between corporate political connections and international experience pursues positive effects on the performance of foreign IPOs.

This research intends to extend the knowledge of how corporate political connections and international work experience affects the performance of Chinese firms attempting to access US capital markets. To date, scholars have not investigated the influence of corporate political connections on the amount of capital raised by foreign IPOs.

Despite indications of scholarly interest, there are still gaps in the research of the concept of felt accountability, especially the felt accountability of board members. This paper aims to clarify the sources of accountability experienced by board members. Especially those in a non-executive capacity. How these sources can be accessed to enhance felt accountability and thereby governance effectiveness is explored.

Qualitative, exploratory research methods were used. In total, 15 semi-structured, in-depth interviews were completed with non-executive board members of Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed companies in South Africa. Thematic content analysis was used to analyse data.

The findings clarified the formal and informal sources of accountability experienced by non-executive board members. This included relational and structural mechanisms that can be used within corporate governance to enhance both types of accountability. Accessing the identified sources of accountability through appropriate mechanisms could increase the levels of felt accountability experienced by the individual non-executive board member, thereby strengthening accountability inside the boardroom and improving overall board effectiveness. The study also revealed a layer of implicit and explicit accountability.

The study was conducted solely in South Africa, with non-executive board members of Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed companies.

There is limited research that clarifies the sources of accountability experienced by non-executive board members. This study aims to address this gap in the literature by providing techniques on how to enable the clarified sources of accountability to improve governance effectiveness.

This study aims to examine the governance role of shareholders and board of directors in determining firm performance through an eclectic multi-theoretic model that integrates structure and incentive functions of agency theory and capability aspect of the resource-based view.

The research model uses a large panel data set of 2,364 UK firms over the period 2000–2010 and uses alternative specifications of the model to improve robustness.

The results show that the industry experience of major shareholders as a proxy for shareholder capability has a significant positive impact on investee firm performance. The findings also reveal that the lock-in effect of the largest shareholder has a positive impact on performance, whereas the monitoring effectiveness of shareholders is not associated with ownership concentration. Moreover, the results indicate the underlying capabilities of the board of directors and their impact on corporate performance – particularly, the interlocking directorates of executives have a positive impact on firm performance but those of non-executives have a negative one. However, the previous directorship experience of non-executives has a positive impact on performance.

This study presents a more comprehensive and complete understanding of the governance-performance relationship beyond the narrow or partial explanations provided by single-theory-based studies or those of investigating the effect of various governance tools separately.

This study provides more insights into the capability dimension of shareholders and the role of incentives in motivating shareholders to exercise stronger oversight on the management rather than just using ownership concentration. Hence, the study can serve as valuable guidance for investors, corporate managers and policymakers.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study that uses an eclectic philosophical approach, integrating the agency theory and resource-based view, to not only examine the impact of board of directors but also investigate the governance role of shareholders in modern corporations to understand how shareholders acquire the requisite skills and information, the best practices and processes, and ultimately use the scarce and inimitable resources that help investee firms in improving their performance.