Wm. Gerard Sanders

Upper Echelons Research Revisited: Antecedents, Elements, and Consequences of Top Management Team Composition

This study reviews recent research building on Hambrick and Mason’s [Hambrick, D. C., & Mason, P. A. (1984). Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its top managers. Academy of Management Review, 9: 193–206] upper echelons (UE) perspective with the aim of identifying challenges and opportunities for future UE-based organizations research. Our review highlights a number of central facets of the UE perspective: It is at once a theoretical framework predicting that organizations will be a reflection of their top management teams and a methodology that relies on executive demography as a measurement proxy for underlying individual and group cognitions and behaviors. In proposing new research directions, we challenge organizations researchers to (1) reconsider the universality of the top management team (TMT) construct, (2) carefully explore the practical and theoretical meaning of TMT demographic characteristics vis-à-vis the deeper constructs they are presumed to proxy, (3) integrate other determinants of managerial cognition and behavior into UE theorizing, and (4) revisit the roles of causality and intertemporal dynamics among the antecedents, consequences, and composition of top management teams.

Internationalization and Firm Governance: The Roles of CEO Compensation, Top Team Composition, and Board Structure

Using the complementary lenses of information-processing and agency theories, this study tests the proposition that the complexity resulting from a firms degree of internationalization will be acc...

Bundling Human Capital with Organizational Context: The Impact of International Assignment Experience on Multinational Firm Performance and CEO Pay

We develop resource- and dynamic capability-based arguments that CEOs with international assignment experience create value for their firms and themselves through their control of a valuable, rare,...

Behavioral Responses of CEOs to Stock Ownership and Stock Option Pay

Executive stock ownership and stock option pay are often assumed to have congruent incentive effects; however, these incentives have asymmetrical risk properties, and executives may respond to them...

Swinging for the Fences: The Effects of Ceo Stock Options on Company Risk Taking and Performance

We unpack the concept of managerial risk taking, distinguishing among three of its major elements: the size of an outlay, the variance of potential outcomes, and the likelihood of extreme loss. We ...

The Effects of Top Management Team Pay and Firm Internationalization on MNC Performance

We examine relationships among top management team (TMT) compensation, a firm’s degree of internationalization (DOI), and its subsequent levels of market and accounting performance. Consistent with our contingency view of information-processing theory, we find that non-CEO total pay and the use of long-term incentive pay are positively associated with subsequent performance, whereas the CEO–TMT total pay gap has negative effects on firm performance. CEO pay has no relationship with performance and TMT pay effects are much stronger in MNCs with high DOI.

International assignment experience at the top can make a bottom‐line difference

This article addresses the question of whether international assignment experience in the top management team makes a bottom-line difference. Based on the premise and observations that executive international assignment experience is rare, valuable, and hard to imitate, we suggest that in the right organizational context, it can create competitive advantage. The authors show how such experience can benefit companies and executives financially and discuss how companies can help ensure a supply of internationally seasoned candidates for future executive positions.

Incentive structure of CEO stock option pay and stock ownership: the moderating effects of firm risk

Outlines previous research on the role of executive compensation contracts in reducing conflicts of interest between ownership and control; and develops hypotheses on the effects of chief executive officer stock options and share ownership on subsequent firm performance. Suggests that since options do not create losses when share prices decline, they encourage more risk taking than share ownership. Explains the methodology used to test these ideas on 1994‐1996 data for a sample of large US firms and presents the results, which suggest that both stock options and share ownership are positively linked to later firm performance but that the link is stronger for ownership in high risk situations, but lower performance where risk is high. Considers the implications for corporate governance and consistency with other research; and calls for further research.