Corporate Governance and Executive Remuneration: A Contingency Framework

By integrating organizational and institutional theories, this paper develops a contingency approach to executive remuneration and assesses its effectiveness in different organizational and institutional contexts. Most of the executive remuneration research focuses on the principal-agent framework and assumes a universal link between executive incentives and performance outcomes. We suggest a framework that examines executive compensation in terms of its organizational contexts and potential complementarities/substitution effects between different corporate governance practices at both the firm and national levels. We also discuss the implications for different approaches to executive compensation policy such as "soft law" and "hard law."