20th September 2024, at 10:30-12:00, HOW.60, 6th floor.

Navigating Power and Success in the Corporate Upper Echelons

PROGRAMME

PAPER 1

Hanging By A Thread While At The Zenith? The Effect Of Career Choices And Social Capital On Directors’ Career Success

Ilaria Orlandi (CBS).

The director labor market literature suggests that the evaluations of directors and their track records can drive board appointments. Integrating insights from career theory into this literature, I posit that directors having career trap directorships, by serving on the board of firms operating in stigmatized industries like alcohol, gambling, or tobacco, can be penalized in the labor market and that their social capital can help them overcome such penalty and achieve career success, in the form of board appointments. I find some support for the theorized effects. This study theoretically expands the director labor market literature by taking a longitudinal perspective on directors’ careers and brings evaluations as a nuanced way of examining how career traps and social capital can affect directors’ career success.

PAPER 2

Elite corporate networks and CEO compensation: The causes and consequences of CEO pay premiums

Thomas Poulsen (CBS), Lasse Folke (CBS), & Dustin Avent-Holt (Augusta University).

CEO compensation has expanded dramatically over the past half-century, with network processes playing a pivotal role. We advance research on these processes by focusing on which CEOs are more likely to get pay premiums and how this effects income going to other actors within the firm. Using Danish registry data and a novel weighted k-core measure of elite connections, our analyses highlight that CEOs embedded in the corporate elite can extract a substantial wage premium. These premiums are then followed by reductions in wages going back to workers over the next three years. However, the more of a firm’s board of directors that are similarly connected to the corporate elite, the less effective are those connections in generating a premium. These findings extend the role of social networks beyond just the diffusion of increasing compensation for CEOs to the creation of inequalities among CEOs and between CEOs and workers.

ABOUT THE SERIES

The CBS Leadership Centre wants to bring together researchers across CBS to inspire and nurture cross-disciplinary thinking on leadership. The Leadership Paper Series are a forum for doing exactly this. We invite junior and senior colleagues, as well as visiting and guest scholars, to present and discuss leadership research in progress from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical traditions. Presenters will receive constructive feedback from discussants and attendees with the aim of developing their papers and arguments for eventual publication.

Papers will be sent out to registered attendees before the event.

Let's stay connected! Interested in speaking at one of our future sessions? Send an email to Dan Kärreman dk.msc@cbs.dk.