This study examines whether the relationship between managerial ability and firm performance is driven by familiness and foreignness of the CEOs. We divide the sample of CEOs according to their familiness and foreignness and estimate CEOs abilities via DEA and Tobit regression. We then employed dynamic GMM panel estimator to address the endogeneity issues. Based on a sample of 361 firms in Malaysia over 2011–2015, we documented empirical evidence that managerial ability of local CEOs with foreign working or education experience are most positively related to Tobin’s Q, followed by local CEOs without foreign experience. We further found that local CEOs contribute to firm performance only if they are not family connected with the firm. Last, our findings also suggest that the presence of foreign CEOs improve the firm performance when they are nonfamily CEOs originated from high management practice countries.
The primary purpose of this study is to develop a novel framework to explain the effects of data-driven leadership in IR4.0 adoption on firm performance. We proposed four dimensions for the data-driven leadership: (1) the experience of key personnel with IR4.0 adoption, (2) the appointment of a chief information officer (CIO), (3) the establishment of a technology committee, and (4) the acquisition of technology. This study includes 943 public-listed firms traded on Bursa Malaysia from 2015 to 2019. Using the random effects model (REM), our study shows that data-driven leadership in IR4.0 adoption, particularly the appointment of a CIO and the acquisition of technology, is positively associated with Tobin’s [Formula: see text] and market-to-book value of the firms. Subsample analysis reveals that data-driven leadership has greater significant positive impacts on firm performance in manufacturing-related firms. Further analysis also provides evidence that CEO duality and CEO age negatively affect the role of CIO in manufacturing firms. In contrast, CEO age and founder CEO negatively affect the role of key personnel fitted with IR4.0 experience in nonmanufacturing firms. However, founder CEO in nonmanufacturing-related firms which incorporated IR4.0 technology into the business could significantly improve firm performance. Lastly, there is a noticeable drop in performance when the boards are busy. Our study provides recommendations to both industry and government IR4.0 policy and contributes to leadership literature scholarly, particularly in the data-driven leadership viewpoint in both manufacturing- and nonmanufacturing-related sectors in the era of IR4.0.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.