Does CEO founder status protect against dismissal?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26485/SPE/2020/115/11Keywords:
corporate governance, agency theory, chief executive officer, CEO turnoverAbstract
Background: The article adds to the limited literature on CEO turnover in emerging market countries and extends the existing research to a different institutional setting with a particular focus on listed companies in an increasingly important Polish business environment. It deals with the problem of CEO turnover in Polish listed companies.
Research purpose: Its main purpose is to scrutinize the impact of company performance and managerial ownership on CEO turnover. It focuses on finding the differences in the CEO turnover antecedences of founder CEO and professional CEO dismissal.
Methods: These relationships were tested using logistic regression. The sample consists of Polish public companies listed on the Main Market of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, encompassing 11 years from 2008 to 2018. The final sample embraces an unbalanced panel sample of 489 companies and 3,763 company-year observations.
Conclusions: The analysis throughout the sample showed that the relationship between firm performance and CEO turnover is negative. Thus, deterioration of firm performance increases the frequency of changes in CEO. However, after conducting an in-depth study, it was found that this relationship is statistically significant only when professional managers manage the companies. The relationship between managerial ownership and turnover was also significant and negative in the whole sample. Still, there were also differences between changes in the CEO position, depending on whether it was the company’s founder or a professional manager. In the case of founder CEOs, this relationship was even significant and positive, as opposed to professional managers. This was the same as in the whole sample.
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