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The purpose of this paper is to understand the conditions under which racial/ethnic minorities are promoted to top leadership positions in American corporations. In addition to testing the glass cliff theory for racial/ethnic minorities, the paper also develops and test two additional theoretical mechanisms: bold moves and the savior effect. While the glass cliff theory predicts racial/ethnic minorities will be promoted to struggling firms, the bold moves theory predicts the opposite, that racial/ethnic minorities will be promoted to strong firms. The savior effect predicts that minority CEOs will be replaced by white male leaders if firm performance struggles during their tenure.

This paper relies on conditional logistic regression to analyze all CEO transitions among Fortune 500 companies over a 15-year period.

Consistent with the bold moves thesis but contrary to the predictions of glass cliff theory, the results suggest that racial/ethnic minorities are more likely than white executives to be promoted CEO in strongly performing firms. As predicted by the savior effect theory, the paper also finds that when firm performance struggles under the leadership of racial/minority CEOs, these leaders are likely to be replaced by white CEOs.

The findings contradict theory of the glass cliff and suggest additional mechanisms that shape the promotion probability of minority leaders.

Race and ethnicity shape promotion and replacement decisions for top leadership positions in important ways. While minority leaders are not set up to fail, as glass cliff theory would predict, the authors do find that confidence in the leadership of minority leaders may be tenuous. To overcome the risks of replacement of minority leaders, firms should seek to eliminate bias by allowing minority leaders enough time and resources to overcome declines in firm performance and increase the transparency of replacement decisions.

This is one of the first studies to test the glass cliff thesis with regard to racial/ethnic minorities. The paper also develops and tests two new mechanisms related to leader succession: bold moves and the savior effect.

Stewardship theory is an emergent approach for explaining leadership behavior, challenging the assumptions of agency theory and its dominance in corporate governance literature. This study revisits the agency and stewardship theories by seeking to answer whether chief executive officers (CEOs) in China are committed stewards or opportunistic agents.

Based on 5,165 observations of 1,036 listed companies in China over the period 2005–2010, the results suggest that the corporate governance mechanisms developed from the agency theory in the West are not necessarily applicable in the Chinese context.

This study supports the stewardship theory in its findings that empowering CEOs through the practice of CEO duality and longer CEO tenure have a positive effect on firm value in China. Additionally, the positive relationships between CEO duality, CEO tenure and firm value are strengthened by the number of executive directors on the board, and weakened by the number of independent directors on the board.

One size does not fit all. Leadership behaviors in China do not follow the agency assumptions inherent in Western practices, rather they favor the conditions of positive leadership expressed by the stewardship theory. Assuming that the motivations of managers in emerging markets such as China are similar to those in the West may lead to a poor fit between governance policies and the institutional context.

As one of the few studies to connect the theoretical debate between the agency and stewardship theories, this study presents new evidence to support the stewardship theory, thereby strengthening its theoretical importance and relevance in corporate governance literature.

There are mainly two viewpoints on women’s leadership effectiveness compared with that of men – the questioning view and the admiring view, two points of view that are not in agreement. Based on that, this study aims to find the gender difference in leadership effectiveness.

This study uses carefully matched male and female presidents (223 pairs) of Chinese listed companies and male and female chief executive officers (141 pairs) of American listed companies as samples. Analysis of variance was conducted to analyze the indicator data of the leadership effectiveness.

The findings show that women’s leadership effectiveness is not significantly inferior to that of men, and that women’s leadership effectiveness compared to that of men in the Chinese cultural context is not inferior to that in the American cultural context. The findings do not support the questioning view of women’s leadership effectiveness.

This study first uses the carefully matched (female/male leaders) data of Chinese listed companies and American listed companies as samples to find which viewpoint (the questioning view and the admiring view) is supported or is not supported.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the engagement of chief executive officers (CEOs) in corporate communication and focus on how their approach to communication develops in relation to the longevity of their tenure. The paper also explores how founder centrality is linked to the objectives of CEO communication and the CEOs’ use of personal social media.

The paper brings together the relevant literature from different disciplines, related to leadership communication, CEO longevity and founder centrality, and reveals a number of unexplored issues. Four research questions were defined and an exploratory survey was carried out, involving 93 CEOs from large companies located in Italy.

The results show that CEOs are strongly engaged in institutional communication. Short-tenured CEOs seem more engaged in building and consolidating relationship networks with specific stakeholders (customers and employees), while long-tenured CEOs tend to be more involved in institutional and financial communications.

Due to the exploratory research design and the circumscribed sample from a single country (Italy), further cross-national evidence is needed to substantiate the suggested links between engagement in communication activities and longevity. The study highlights the managerial and communication skills that CEOs must be provided with during their corporate tenure, thus suggesting the need to further examine the “life cycle” of CEO communication activities.

The paper sheds light on CEO communication dynamics. It is the first of its kind in the Italian context, where some factors, such as longevity of tenure, seem to play an important role in shaping corporate communication objectives and activities.

This study focused on the issue of CEO tenure in three non‐profit community‐based organizations – each with an at least 25‐year long CEO tenure – located in two US northeastern urban centers. Using a questionnaire and a semi‐structured interview, we investigated reasons for the CEOs’ extraordinarily long tenures in office: the CEOs themselves, their organizations, and the environments in which they operated. The following were among the data findings re the CEOs: they were founders of their organization; were power brokers within the political community; managed their staff and boards of directors; possessed a vision and continued to initiate new projects; exhibited a passion for work; and had a succession plan. Some issues for future research are presented.

The gender diversity of top management teams (TMTs) is slowly increasing. Research shows that top executives influence firms through their role in strategic decision-making but that executives are not equally engaged in it. The purpose of this paper is to understand whether gender affects the likelihood of inclusion in strategic decision-making.

Drawing on surveys completed by chief executive officers (CEOs) and using expectation states and gender roles theories, the author examines the relationship between gender and inclusion in strategic decision-making for 266 top executives of global public firms.

After controlling for a myriad of factors, results indicate that female executives are less likely than male executives to be included in strategic decision-making. Firm tenure moderates this effect such that it leads to a greater likelihood of inclusion for female executives but not male executives.

This study provides a unique consideration of strategic decision-making in TMTs. The findings suggest that diversity and inclusion do not always go hand in hand and that female executives may need to prove themselves more than male executives to be given an equal voice in the strategic direction of the firm.

This paper aims to investigate and discover the demographic characteristics of corporate leaders (CEOs) in Fintech sector firms representing the implementation of the sustainable business model. Particularly, the purpose is to identify a benchmark profile of CEOs and to understand which are the main features (e.g. age, tenure, education specification, education level, gender, nationality, years of entrepreneurship, years in financial functions, years in IT functions), giving more opportunity to develop and maintain sustainable business models using innovative platforms.

The research questions are answered through a quali-quantitative methodology using descriptive and statistical approaches. The researchers collected a sample of 100 Fintech firms from the main Fintech firms in 2018 identified by the annual KPMG Report (2019). Thus, the research observed and tested the average level of the major CEO demographic features. Additionally, the paper explored whether these variables have a major probability to affect Fintech leading.

Assuming a relevant part of Fintech firms, the main results of this paper show the relevance of several CEO demographic characteristics. Additionally, the age, the tenure and the presence of an MBA are significant elements in affecting Leading companies.

The paper is novel because it contributes to the literature examining the internal governance and sustainable business model, still not explored. Moreover, this study contributes to identifying the CEO demographic characteristics that foster financial institutions' transition towards sustainable business models.

This paper aims to examine the effect of outside chief executive officer (CEO) succession on firm innovation in Chinese companies and to explore the mechanism behind the process. By analyzing the motivation of CEO successors of different origins in the context of selection, this paper identifies the factors affecting outside CEO successors’ decision-making on post-succession firm innovation.

A Poisson regression model is used on a sample of 1,084 firm-year observations taken from Chinese listed companies that endured CEO succession during the period of 2009–2016. Fixed-effect Poisson regression modeling was performed after likelihood ratio and Hausman testing to assess the robustness of the findings.

The results show that outside CEO successions are significantly and negatively associated with post-succession firm innovation. Moreover, the authors found a negative effect of outside CEO succession on post-succession firm innovation when the predecessor has a long tenure or the successor is older.

.This study contributes to the literature on CEO succession, CEO–board relationships and firm innovation by shedding light on how agency, human capital and career-concerning theories in the CEO selection context apply to corporate governance and strategy. Moreover, by exploring the factors influencing CEO successors’ decision-making in terms of firm innovation in the Chinese social and cultural context, this paper identifies ways to promote firm innovation for Chinese companies from the concept of leadership succession.

The upper-echelons model of Hambrick and Mason ((1984). Academy of Management Review, 9, 193–206) launched a new area of research and provided the first overall theoretical framework for use in understanding how the experiences, backgrounds, and values of senior executives in organizations can influence the decisions that they make. The model is typically assumed to be what Rousseau ((1985). In: B. M. Staw, & L. L. Cumming (Eds), Research in organizational behavior (Vol. 7, pp. 1–37). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press) calls “multi-level,” as it describes how both individuals and top management teams (TMTs) make decisions in line with their preferences, biases, and values; the same model is applicable to both individuals and groups. However, the levels issues in the model have never been subjected to rigorous analysis. This chapter juxtaposes levels concepts and theories on the upper-echelons model, in an effort to highlight its strengths as well as its weaknesses. While the majority of researchers use the model to describe team-level decision making, the analysis presented here reveals that the model is inherently individual-level in focus, and several important limitations must be overcome before the model will provide a full explanation of team-level decision making.

Upper echelons theory regards the CEO as a top management team (TMT) member. Research has rarely distinguished the CEO from other TMT members and has not explained the boundaries between them, which causes little attention to be paid to the interaction between the CEO and TMT members. The authors want to divide the CEO and other TMT members into two independent parts and explore the types of interactions between them and the impact of these interactions on organizational performance. The two independent parts and their interactions are important for the integration, supplementation and refinement of leader-team research in the empirical field.

A-share listed companies in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange with continuous operation from 2012 to 2015 were selected as samples. The data in the sample were mainly from the CSMAR database and the obtained data were checked with the data in RESSET, Sina Finance, Phoenix New Media and Eastmoney to ensure their accuracy and completeness. Finally, 209 companies were selected as the sample. The authors used SPSS 22.0 to process data.

The results showed that social network interaction, skill interaction and social experience interaction between the CEO and TMT members significantly affected organizational performance and the effects are more significant than those of the CEO and TMT members individually.

Such consideration can more clearly clarify the organizational use of CEO and TMT members and the complementary and overlapping relationships between them. Further, such consideration is instructive for the rational allocation and efficient operation of leaders and their team members in practice.