Role Of Chief Executive Officer Research Articles

Transitions in the Hierarchy of Authority in Hospitals: Implications for the Role of the Chief Executive Officer

Hospitals are being transformed from a cottage industry in which each institution is relatively autonomous to a series of multihospital systems where a network of individual institutions are directed from corporate headquarters. The present paper examines the impact of adding a hierarchical level to the top of the hospital on the role of the hospital's chief executive officer (CEO). We report results of CEO functioning (201 from multihospital systems and 188 from traditionalfreestanding hospitals) relative to (1) division of labor, (2) needfor coordination, and (3) managerial autonomy. We show that multisystem CEOs' activities are more standardized, but not more specialized, than those of freestanding hospital CEOs; however, we show only moderate support for the increased involvement in coordination activities for those in multihospital systems. Finally, while CEOs in multihospital systems exhibit less actual autonomy in their roles as managers, they perceive themselves as having more autonomy than CEOs in freestanding hospitals. These findings are considered with respect to the administrator's credo of balancing the need of communities for healthcare with the organization's need to remain financially viable.

The Wealth Effects of Litigation by Targets: Do Interests Diverge in a Merge?

PUBLIC tender offers for control are often resisted by the target's top management.' This recalcitrance takes many forms, from newspaper advertisements urging shareholder rejection to more costly legal actions.2 This paper focuses on litigious target managements, since these serious defensive efforts usually delay considerably the execution of the defendant's tender offer. In some cases the litigious defense forces the sole bidder to withdraw the premium offer, imposing large losses on shareholders. These losses cause many to question whether strenuous legal defense by target management is consistent with their legal duty to maximize shareholder wealth.3

Separation of Ownership and Control

ABSENT fiat, the form of organization that survives in an activity is the one that delivers the product demanded by customers at the lowest price while covering costs.1 Our goal is to explain the survival of organizations characterized by separation of "ownership" and "control"-a problem that has bothered students of corporations from Adam Smith to Berle and Means and Jensen and Meckling.2 In more precise language, we are concerned with the survival of organizations in which important decision agents do not bear a substantial share of the wealth effects of their decisions. We argue that the separation of decision and risk-bearing functions observed in large corporations is common to other organizations such as large professional partnerships, financial mutuals, and nonprofits. We contend that separation of decision and risk-bearing functions survives in these organizations in part because of the benefits of specialization of

The Structure of Ownership and the Theory of the Firm

The separation of ownership from control produces a condition where the interests of owner and of ultimate manager may, and often do, diverge, and where many of the checks which formerly operated to limit the use of power disappear.... In creating these new relationships, the quasi-public corporation may fairly be said to work a revolution. It ... has divided ownership into nominal ownership and the power formerly joined to it. Thereby the corporation has changed the nature of profit-seeking enterprise.1

'The Chief Executive's Job: A Comparison of 1970 and 1980'.

This section introduces a series of papers regarding the role of chief executive officers between 1970 and 1980 in the U.S, including: Four Dimensions of Executive Time, by G. Homer Durham, Decision By Consensus, by Warren E. Avis.