Succession rules for CEO in Japanese firms : institutions and agency

The succession of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) has attracted growing attention from social scientists and management researchers. CEO succession provides a context in which individual decisions and agency, stakeholder interests and conflict, and the organizational needs for legitimacy and acceptance in the large environment come together. Most of these researches, however, have been conducted in the U.S., where the board of directors has the legal and actual responsibility for appointing and replacing the CEO. CEO succession still remains unexplored terrain in countries such as Japan in which the corporation system differs significantly from the U.S. For example, the board of directors in Japan is composed primarily of executives and non-executive members of the firm and overwhelmingly represents the interests of the employees. Also, a Japanese CEO enjoys considerable autonomy from stakeholder influence, where he is usually the sole authority in deciding the timing of his own retirement as well as his successor. Although main banks provide a limit to CEO power, they tend to refrain from intervening in CEO succession until the firm is in a dire condition. In this thesis, I apply the model of CEO succession based on U.S. firms to the study of Japanese CEO succession. I address three questions: 1) what are the rules in the shacho (Japanese equivalent of CEO) succession process; 2) how are the rules framed and what does this linguistic framing suggest about shacho succession in Japan; and 3) how do the rules affect the various succession processes, such as the timing of change as well as the relationship between performance and rules.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2001

Author dc:creator

• Kim, Hyosun, 1967-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• D. Eleanor Westney.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17507

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/17507