Abstract/Summary

The focus in the current thesis will be on identifying the impact that CEOs have on the performance of the publicly traded firms they lead. While much research on CEO impacts have been undertaken in the Western context, there is a dearth of research in the Middle Eastern context. Hence, this thesis explores the impact that CEOs have on corporate performance within this context, thus addressing an identified void in the literature. In particular, the countries of interest are the six member nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) namely, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Data was collected on all publicly traded companies in the GCC from the period of 1997-2019, spanning 50 industries, 645 firms and 1,064 distinct CEOs, and 14,673 firm-year observations for subsequent analysis. This study relies on a variance decomposition method to assess the relative importance of the CEO. Specifically, it adopts the CEO-in-context methodology advanced by Hambrick and Quigley (2014) to investigate CEO effects, across companies and countries. This is the first study to extend this methodology into the GCC context, and therefore answers calls in the literature for work which considers non-Western contexts. Using the construct of managerial discretion (Crossland and Hambrick, 2011; Haj Youssef and Christodoulou, 2017) at the national and regional levels the results highlight the relationship between the level of managerial discretion and the impact, or effect, the CEO has on firm performance. These results therefore support theoretical positions in the extant literature, which are predominantly documented within a Western context. As such, this thesis makes a contribution to theory in underscoring the importance of managerial discretion, and the influence of national culture, in moderating the influence CEOs have on the performance of the companies they lead. The findings identify a range of cross-national differences in the CEO effect, with important implications for corporate performance.