Recruiting, selecting, retaining, and monitoring successful investment managers: A review of a scattered literature

Abstract

This article attempts a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary review of a scattered literature on the characteristics of successful investment managers. It considers nonpeer reviewed papers and reports written by organizations and human resource experts but also empirical papers from those in disciplines such as business studies, economics, finance, psychology, and psychiatry. It focuses on three issues: Ability, personality, and motivation. Most of the studies have concentrated on motivation and various themes are apparent suggesting that it is possible to profile successful investment managers.

Saintly fund managers cannot earn a license to make sinful investments

“…Do people offer fund managers a 'license' to invest unethically based on past ethical behavior? A growing literature suggests that the traits of fund managers influence perceptions of their investment behavior (Brown et al, 2018;Furnham, 2020;Hegde & Mishra, 2019;ten Brinke et al, 2018). Past moral behavior signals that one holds moral values and goals and is willing to put in the effort to acting on these values, i.e., moral character, which people perceive as holistically reflective of an array of positive traits (Fleeson et al, 2014).…”