Spotlight on the Corporate Apex: Investigating Corporate CEOs and Their Corporate-Level Impact

With the rise of the modern corporation, corporate CEOs and how they manage the overall firm have become crucial concerns in management research and management practice. In such corporations - multi-business and multi-national companies -, it is mainly through the corporate headquarters (CHQ) that the corporate CEO manages the overall firm. For the purpose of this research project, these two aspects are referred to as the corporate apex .
Although a substantial body of knowledge on the CEO as well as on the CHQ has ac-cumulated with studies contributing to various management domains, including strategy, organization, and international management research, our knowledge falls short in two ways: (1) research on the CEO and work on the CHQ have largely developed on separate tracks and (2) essential pillars of the existing knowledge in both domains have dramatically changed.
Aiming to address these shortcomings, I examine the relationships between corporate CEOs and how the CHQ manages the overall firm. The overall objective of this research program is to launch and carry out new research projects to link the two aspects of the corporate apex. The research program is comprised of four self-contained but interrelated studies - a conceptual/review study and three empirical studies - which rely on different theoretical approaches. Overall, the research program aims at contributing to the corporate strategy and governance research.