Abstract
The chief operating officer (COO) often represents the second in command of an organization to the CEO. Past research on the impact of CEO/COO duos on firm performance offers conflicting results both theoretically and empirically. Some suggest that duos enhance performance through information processing and TMT coordination (Hambrick & Cannella, 2004; Marcel, 2009). Others however suggest that separating the CEO from operations can be detrimental for firm outcomes (Charan & Colvin, 1999). In our paper we use the attention based view (Ocasio, 1997) to suggest that it is not so much a matter of if but when CEO/COO duos enhance performance. We argue that increased external task demands benefit from CEO/COO duos whereas increased internal task demands lead to lower outcomes from CEO/COO duos. Using data from Execucomp and Compustat we test our hypothesis and find general support for our theory.
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