Steven Boivie

Me or We: The Effects of CEO Organizational Identification on Agency Costs

The corporate governance literature on potential remedies for the agency problem has focused largely on external control mechanisms, especially board independence. We instead consider how an intern...

Burr Under the Saddle: How Media Coverage Influences Strategic Change

In this paper we introduce a new antecedent to the strategic change literature by examining the effect of media coverage on the extent of strategic change. Specifically, we examine how negative media coverage may prompt firms to make changes to their resource allocations and then explore how the makeup of the board and firm performance can moderate this relationship. We develop a theoretical framework to explain why media coverage may affect strategic change and then test our theory with a longitudinal analysis of 250 firms over a four-year period. The empirical results lend support to our theory of media influence on strategic change and suggest that the evaluations of firms by outside constituents may influence the decision making of executives.

Director Human Capital, Information Processing Demands, and Board Effectiveness

Research on human capital as a source of competitive advantage has focused largely on firm employees. In this article, we argue that outside directors’ general human capital can also be a source of competitive advantage. Firm performance is likely to benefit from directors’ human capital—that is, their prior experience and education—because such human capital is likely to make them more effective at monitoring management and providing advice. Drawing on insights from research on individuals’ cognitive limitations, we further argue that the extent to which the firm is able to benefit from this human capital can be severely limited by the demands for information processing that directors face from their other board positions. Consequently, we find that the benefit of directors’ human capital is contingent upon the information processing load placed upon them from their other board appointments. We find support for our hypotheses using data on over 5,700 directors from 650 firms sampled from the Fortune 1000. This study extends the nascent literature on board human capital by showing that in addition to specific expertise in relevant areas, directors’ general human capital can also help firms create competitive advantage. The theory developed in this article also contributes to the literature on strategic human capital by incorporating the concept of information processing demands, suggesting that not only do such demands leave limited cognitive capacity for directors to focus on the focal firm but also that they can severely diminish the beneficial effects of directors’ general human capital.

Are Boards Designed to Fail? The Implausibility of Effective Board Monitoring

Abstract In this review, we challenge the idea that directors are well positioned to be effective monitors of management. Moving beyond the logic of incentives and ability, we conceptualize a model based on the premise of boards as groups of individuals obtaining, processing and sharing information and explain how variation in information-processing demands at the director, board and firm level may challenge effective monitoring. We draw on multiple theoretical perspectives to identify these barriers to effective board monitoring. Our goal in reviewing these barriers is to help us take stock of existing research in corporate governance and to better explain board behavior beyond traditional agency and resource dependency accounts. We also aim to uncover gaps in the conceptual and empirical research and suggest areas of fruitful future research.

Toward a Configurational Perspective on the CEO A Review and Synthesis of the Management Literature

Management literature offers substantial insight about many aspects of CEO-related phenomena. Whether it involves aspects of the position of CEO, personal characteristics of the CEO, or the environment in which the CEO operates, research about the CEO has yielded a number of important findings. Despite the proliferation of research regarding the CEO, we find that the literature as a whole is fragmented. By this, we mean that the CEO is often used as a context to test discrete theories. In this article, we contend that the fragmentation in the literature is a result of scholarship existing within theoretical fault lines and rarely venturing to incorporate theories beyond a given domain. This fragmentation results in inconsistent and inconclusive findings in the CEO-related literature. We propose an integrative framework, which we call the configurational perspective on the CEO, to help resolve this fragmentation problem. The configurational perspective on the CEO highlights three separate CEO-related research domains: the position, the person, and the environment. In taking stock of research in each of these domains, we address how they can be integrated in different configurations to help reduce the fragmented nature of the literature.

Social Comparison and Reciprocity in Director Compensation

In this article, we develop theory regarding one set of mechanisms through which increases in the compensation of directors are transmitted throughout the director labor market. In a longitudinal study using director compensation data from 1996 to 2005, we test hypotheses about how directors’ use of social comparison processes, and reciprocity between CEOs and the board, drive up the compensation level for boards of directors. Specifically, we argue and find that directors’ home firms and interlocked boards serve as salient comparison groups for board members.

Changing of the Guard: Shifting the Conversation Surrounding CEO Turnover

The importance of CEO turnover for organizations is well established. Indeed, CEO turnover is inevitable in organizations and can have a significant impact on firm outcomes. Given its importance, r...

Effects of Conformity to and Deviation from the Crowd:Reputation in the Context of Equity Analysts

Despite the importance of building and maintaining reputations, relatively little research has been devoted to understanding how conformity to or deviation from one’s peers’ actions might affect on...

WHAT'S ALL THAT (STRATEGIC) NOISE? AN EXAMINATION OF ANTICIPATORY OBFUSCATION IN CEO SUCCESSIONS.

The article presents the results of research on executive succession, focusing on the strategic noise which is often used to deliberately obscure the details of chief executive officer succession planning. An overview of related previous studies is provided, along with details of the research protocol, which involved data analysis of all Fortune 1000 firms between 1998 and 2005. It was found that the uncertainty and confusion surrounding such transitions is largely rooted in impression management strategies intended to take advantage of informational asymmetry, in order to influence the public perception of such transitions.