Increasing evidence suggests the personal traits of chief executive officers (CEOs) can influence corporate policies. We examine how one dimension, past professional experiences, can affect corporate payout policy. Exploiting exogenous CEO turnovers and future employment, we hypothesize that CEOs experiencing a distress event in their past career alter the corporate payout policy at their subsequent firm of employment. We discover that CEOs having experienced prior professional career distress are less likely to pay dividends and use repurchases and pay out lower levels for each type of payout. Additionally, when CEOs with distress do have a payout policy greater than zero dollars, there exists a preference toward the use of repurchases in the payout policy, adding to the literature of substitution and differences between the two forms of payout. We find that dividend smoothing is reduced by CEOs that have past professional distress. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The last two decades of the twentieth century saw unprecedented change in the Western Australian public sector. Legislative reform, royal commissions and new policies aimed at enhancing public sector accountability, transparency and efficiency have served to highlight the critical role of CEOs in delivering change. Underpinning sustainable organisational change is cultural change, which in-turn is most effectively driven by a transformational leadership style. There has been little research into CEOs' perceptions of their role in leading cultural change in their organisations. This thesis details an exploratory study of WA public sector CEOs. It discovered that CEOs identified with elements characterising the theoretical construct of a transformational leader. They perceived cultural change as the realignment of organisational values and behaviour with mission, government and community expectations, efficiency and effectiveness. CEOs actively deployed a number of strategies to bring about cultural change but were uncertain about the extent which substantive cultural change was taking place within the public sector. Factors they saw as impacting on their capacity to lead such change included the Government's policy agenda, management theory and potentially, peer support. CEOs who participated in the study were predominantly career public servants, male, over the age of fifty, had worked exclusively in the public sector and only led a small number of organisations. They had mixed views about the impact of such demographics on a CEO's capacity to effectively lead cultural change citing situational factors and personal attributes as being significant variables. There were a number of clear findings from the study that have significant, practical implications for the public sector. CEOs would benefit from a government that communicated a stronger sense of vision about the ++ / future directions of the sector. CEOs require structured opportunities to enhance their competencies in the leadership of change and incentives to commit to change agendas that may extend well beyond the tenure of their employment contacts. Finally, CEOs cannot effectively transform organisational culture without support from other leaders and strategic plans that take account of emerging demographic shifts in the workforce that will inevitably impact on staff values, behaviours and expectations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Commonwealth University, 2006. / Prepared for: Dept. of Health Administration. Bibliography: leaves 132-140. Also available online.

This study is designed to investigate the development of managerial activities and competency of chief executive officers ( CEO ) or superintendents in major healthcare organizations. We used activity competency model ( ACM ) to perceive the importance of managerial activities, skills and knowledge required for them. A survey was designed based on ACM for data collection which includes twenty managerial activities and fourteen competency required to effectively perform these activities. Through personal interviews and questionnaire, the data were collected from ten CEO or superintendents for analysis. The results from this study implicate the setting organizational vision and mission, crisis management, positive ethical work and inspiring or supporting subordinates as the most important managerial activities; analysis and problem solving, leadership, communication and coordination and system thinking as the most important competency. These results can be served as guideline for recruiting and training the chief executive officers of healthcare organizations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-89).

Not available / text

How is it that some potentially strategic issues find themselves on a Rim's strategic agenda, while others do not? Why is a top manager more attentive to some aspects of his firm's strategic situation than to others? What shapes his interpretation of his firm's strategic reality? How does strategic issue diagnosis (SID) actually take place within a top management team? These are the types of questions that this thesis addresses. It contends that the way strategy formation in general and SID in particular have so far been studied in top management teams---through essentially cognitive lenses---has been inadequate, largely because these cognitive approaches, although concerned with the biases that affect thinking are themselves based on an incomplete and therefore biased and distorted view of people, their choices and their actions. / The findings of a single-case field study that explored strategy formation and SID in a medium-sized entrepreneurial family firm led by a still-active founder are presented. The study utilized an enlarged conceptual framework that combined the dominant cognitive approaches in this domain with certain concepts from dynamic psychology. Its findings show that the deeply-entrenched personal preoccupations of a CEO, shaped by developmental processes and formative experiences throughout his life, and of which his cognitions are only one manifestation, have the potential to profoundly influence his strategic orientations, the top management team (TMT) dynamics in his firm, and consequently SID and its outcomes. It concludes that enriching the dominant cognitive models of SID and strategy formation by incorporating concepts taken from psychodynamic theory (specifically, concepts dealing with the consistent manifestations of individual character in all aspects of an individual's life) can lead to a better understanding of the complex subjective phenomena involved.

Large corporate organizations in Durban are hiring younger, less experienced and highly qualified individuals to lead at the top end of the company. Various concerns are raised with regard to these and other demographic variables in terms of the organization reaching its optimum success. In dissecting the problem statement, the following variables are extracted. These variables include: academic qualification, leadership experience, leadership training and age. The sample is segmented using academic qualification as the central focus. The research, quantitative in nature is aimed to establish if there exists a significant difference in self-perception leadership styles between these variables upon investigating the specific hypothesis generated. Interesting conclusions were drawn. / Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Marilyn Laiken.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Robert Freeman. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.