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The authors examine the impact of CEO generalist experience on firm performance. Using 522 listed firms in Indonesia for the period 2010–2018, the authors find that the generalist CEO is negatively associated with firm performance. Generalist CEOs tend to experience ambiguity in adjustments in the new environment. In order to decrease the impact of a generalist CEO, our empirical evidence finds that CEO tenure does not significantly moderate the association between the two. This is because generalist CEOs with longer tenure tend to avoid changing strategies, and therefore the negative impact of CEO generalist is not altered. The results of this study provide suggestions for the firm in the developing country to appoint a CEO with generalist experience.

Through the lens of the upper echelons theory, this study aims to investigate how generalist chief executive officers (CEOs) affect social novelty. This paper also explores the moderating effect of CEO power on the relationship between generalist CEOs and social novelty.

This study uses generalized estimating equation models and robust standard errors by firm to correct for autoregressive disturbances within clusters in the data.

Restaurant firms with generalist CEOs are likely to feature gender diversity and member change in the top management structure. This positive effect of a generalist CEO on top management team’s (TMT) structure is enhanced by the CEO’s power over board members.

This study presents important evidence that CEOs’ characteristics largely influence the gender heterogeneity and dynamic of the TMT, which in turn promote and shape innovative initiatives and actions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first to investigate the effect of CEOs’ human capital on the way in which the TMT is composed and characterized in the restaurant sector.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the debate in the literature about generalist CEOs by exploring the effect of board governance on CEO general managerial ability, focusing on one of the most crucial aspects of the board of directors, board size. Prior research shows that smaller boards constitute a more effective governance mechanism and therefore are expected to reduce agency costs.

The authors estimate the effect of board size on CEO general managerial ability, using a fixed-effects regression analysis, propensity score matching, as well as an instrumental-variable analysis. These techniques mitigate endogeneity greatly and make the results much more likely to show causality.

The results show that firms with smaller board size are more likely to hire generalist CEOs. Specifically, a decline in board size by one standard deviation raises CEO general managerial ability by 15.62%. A lack of diverse experiences in a small board with fewer directors makes it more necessary to hire a CEO with a broad range of professional experiences. Furthermore, the agency costs associated with generalist CEOs are greatly diminished in firms with a smaller board. Hence, firms with a smaller board are more inclined to hire generalist CEOs.

Although prior research has explored the effects of board size on various corporate outcomes, strategies and policies, this study is the first to investigate the effect of board size on CEO general managerial ability. This study contributes to the literature both in corporate governance and on CEO general managerial ability.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of short sellers in foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions. Drawing on threat rigidity theory, the authors argue that short sellers pose a threat to chief executive officers (CEOs) by exerting downward pressure to target firms’ stock prices. That threat will evoke rigid managerial responses that hinder new FDI activities. The authors also posit that CEOs will be less reactive to short sellers’ threats when they are generalist CEOs who have extensive general work experience or when they serve as the board chair.

The authors collect data from S&P 1,500 firms, and the final sample consists of 717 firms and 6,930 firm-year observations from 1998 to 2016. The authors use an Arellano and Bond generalized method of moments static linear probability panel data model and an instrumental panel count data model to test the hypotheses.

The findings support the hypotheses and suggest that CEOs who are under more pressure from short sellers engage in fewer new FDI activities. The negative impact of short sellers on FDI decisions is less salient when CEOs have general work experience or are the chairperson of the board.

This study contributes to the international business research by stressing the need to consider the role of short sellers in firm internationalization decisions.

The role of chief executive officer (CEO) personal characteristics in shaping corporate policies has attracted increasing academic attention in the past two decades. In this review, the authors synthesize extant research on CEO attributes by reviewing 232 articles published in 29 journals from the accounting, finance and management literature. This review provides an overview of existing findings, highlights current trends and interdisciplinary differences in research approaches and identifies potential avenues for future research.

To review the literature on CEO attributes, the authors manually collected peer-reviewed articles in accounting, finance and management journals from 2000 to 2021. The authors conducted in-depth analysis of each paper and manually recorded the theories, data sources, country of study, study period, measures of CEO attributes and dependent variables. This procedure helped the authors group the selected articles into themes and sub-themes. The authors compared the findings in various disciplines and provided direction for future research.

The authors highlight the role of CEO personal attributes in influencing corporate decision-making and firm outcomes. The authors categorize studies of CEO traits into three main research themes: (1) demographic attributes and experience (including age, gender, culture, experience, education); (2) CEO interactions with others (social and political networks) and (3) underlying attributes (including personality, values and ideology). The evidence shows that CEO characteristics significantly affect a wide range of specific corporate policies that serve as mechanisms through which individual CEOs determine firm success and performance.

CEO selection is one of the most crucial decisions made by corporations. The study findings provide valuable insights to corporate executives, boards, investors and practitioners into how CEOs’ personal characteristics can impact future firm decisions and outcomes that can, in turn, inform the high-stake process of CEO recruitment and selection. The study findings have significant practical implications for corporations, such as contributing to executive training programs, to assist executives and directors attain a greater level of self-awareness.

Building on the theoretical foundation of upper echelons theory, the authors offer an integrated theoretical framework to consolidate existing empirical research on the impacts of CEO personal attributes on firm outcomes across accounting and finance (A&F) and management literature. The study findings provide a roadmap for scholars to bridge the interdisciplinary divide between A&F and management research. The authors advocate a more holistic and multifaceted approach to examining CEOs, each of whom embodies a myriad of personal characteristics that comprise their unique identity. The study findings encourage future researchers to expand the investigation of the boundary conditions that magnify or moderate the impacts of CEO idiosyncrasies.

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.

This study aims to explore the impacts of the knowledge structure of CEO on corporate innovation strategy in the background of China’s national policy of innovation-driven development.

Regression analysis is used to test the direct effects and the moderating roles of financial and power incentives. It screens 685 listed companies from Chinese stock market, with the time window from 2016 to 2018.

CEO’s knowledge breadth has a significant impact on innovation strategy, but the moderating effects of power and financial incentives are not significant. CEO’s knowledge depth is negatively correlated to corporate innovation strategy; moreover, power incentive significantly strengthens the relationship, whereas financial incentive significantly weakens it.

Firms are suggested to optimize CEO knowledge structure and organizational incentive system for better implementing innovation-driven development strategy.

It is beneficial to the exploration of the micro-mechanism that enables corporate innovation strategy. Scholars may gain additional insights into the strategic management of corporate innovation from the perspective of CEO’s knowledge structure.

Prior research shows that managers with lower ability release less accurate management earnings forecasts and have more earnings restatements, lower earnings persistence and lower quality accruals estimations. Yet, whether the impact of managerial ability (MA) on financial reporting can be extended to the narrative section of firms' financial disclosures needs to be theoretically and empirically examined. The authors theorize in this paper that managers with low ability opportunistically inflate the tone to increase outsiders' perceptions of their ability. The authors also examine the relation between MA and the informativeness of tone to predict future firm performance and explain investors' reaction at earnings announcement.

The authors collect 24,000 earnings press releases of 1,149 distinct firms between 2004 and 2013. Content analysis is used to proxy the tone of the disclosures. The authors use the score developed by Demerjian et al. (2012) to measure MA. The authors then employ panel data regressions to examine the impact of MA on disclosure tone.

The authors find that low-ability managers inflate the disclosure tone to positively influence labor market's perceptions about their ability. This effect is magnified for younger and shorter-tenured managers, for firms with more intense monitoring and during bear markets. The authors also find that the tone of earnings press releases of low-ability managers results in a lower stock price reaction. Supplementary analyses show that the results do not only hold for the tone, but also can be extended to other linguistic features such as the numerical intensity and the readability of earnings press releases. The results are robust to alternative library specifications and other corporate disclosures such as CEO letters to shareholders or 10-K filings.

The paper shows that managers worry about how firm performance influences the labor market assessment of their ability. In particular, the authors find that managers of low ability are willing to opportunistically manipulate the content of corporate disclosures to improve this perception and build their reputation.

The authors contribute by providing theoretical and empirical evidence on how managers attempt to steer assessments of their ability by manipulating corporate disclosures. Consistent with prior business research suggesting that one's ability is a key feature that affects managers' propensity to engage in ethical practices, such as tax avoidance or manipulation of financial information, this study shows that less able managers tend to inflate the tone of the earnings announcements and that this ability-driven bias is likely to be magnified by career concerns.

The purpose of this study is to study the impact of the chief executive officer (CEO) general work experience on the level of firm internationalization in the form of foreign direct investment.

The author collects and analyzes data on publicly traded US firms in the manufacturing sector from 1993 to 2012.

The author finds that CEOs with more general work experience tend to engage in a higher degree of foreign direct investment (FDI)-based internationalization. This relationship will be weakened by CEO stock ownership and enhanced by CEO Ivy League education.

This study enriches the understanding of the important role top managers play in internationalization decisions. The study also contributes to the literature on managerial risk-taking by exploring the outcomes of managerial risk-taking, which have been less studied than the antecedents.

The purpose of this study is threefold: to examine the impact of a remuneration committee (RC) on the level of chief executive officer (CEO) remuneration; whether firms with a RC, pay a premium to CEOs with different skill sets (general or specific); and whether a pay premium mitigates the potential for CEO turnover.

This study uses a sample of 5,305 firm-year observations on a data set drawn from companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange for the period 2007 to 2014. The authors use ordinary least squares as well as logit regression techniques to test the formulated hypotheses. Difference in difference and propensity score matching techniques were undertaken to address the endogeneity concerns.

The findings show that firms with a RC pay a higher total remuneration to CEOs compared to firms without a RC. Furthermore, firms with a RC, value and reward CEOs with general skills by paying a premium not offered to CEOs with industry-specific skills. Paying a premium, in turn, mitigates CEO turnover by strengthening the CEO’s commitment to the organisation.

The study helps us to understand the critical role played by the RC in the remuneration of CEOs. The findings show that RCs act as an effective governance mechanism to deal with issues of executive remuneration and to retain skilled CEOs. Additionally, CEOs who acquire and develop general managerial skills will be able to extract higher pay from improved bargaining power. The findings will be of relevance to shareholders, regulators and company management who have an interest in executive pay and performance.