#xanthe-townend
https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/28670/1/Townend_X_Business_PhD_2020.pdf
is social capital valued by recruiting trusts, and does the baseline performance of the trust affect the value placed on social capital by the recruiting trust? Within the NHS, the CEO labour market is relatively small and it is rare for newly appointed CEOs to come from outside the NHS. Fewer than 3% of newly appointed CEOs in my data sample came from outside the NHS. This means that in most cases, a board is deciding between candidates from within the trust and those external to the trust, yet within the wider NHS #social-capital #nhs #work #growth
Adler & Kwon 2002 - ‘Social capital is the goodwill available to individuals or groups. Its source lies in the structure and content of the actor’s social relations. Its effects flow from the information, influence, and solidarity it makes available to the actor’ (pg. 23). Different types of social capital have been defined depending on the researchers’ view of the nature of the social ties involved. #social-networks #linguistic-relativity
Despite its increasingly wide usage in a range of academic disciplines (Adler and Kwon, 2002), social capital theory has been criticised due to its perceived ambiguity (Claridge, 2018). This criticism is focused around three main claims, the first of which is that it is not social. Since it cannot be observed directly it often has to be proxied by observable measures (Claridge, 2018). Sources of social capital include other people and the obligations owed from them (Portes, 1998) but opportunity, motivation and ability are all required for that capital to be activated (Adler and Kwon, 2002). These are intangible concepts which, unlike economic capital, which is observable in people’s bank accounts (Portes, 1998), require some approximation of quantity and form. #intagibility #qualititative-data
Whilst human capital is accumulated through investment in personal attributes, social capital is accumulated through investment in social networks (Sauerwald et al., 2016) #investment
Capital has been described as any source of power that can be used to benefit a person (Fitzsimmons and Callan, 2016) yet within the context of CEOs it is useful to differentiate between sources of social capital and human capital (Hillman and Dalziel, 2003; Haynes and Hillman, 2010; Sauerwald et al., 2016). Human capital is acquired through the knowledge and skills accumulated through previous work experience whilst social capital is derived from social relationships both external to the firm, within the firm, and through reputation and prestige (Johnson et al., 2012). The two concepts of social and human capital are linked such that social relationships can be viewed as resources that can help develop and accumulate human capital (Machalek and Martin, 2015). Individuals can compensate for a lack of human capital through having greater social capital (Adler and Kwon, 2002), although this can only get a person so far before the need for human capital will outweigh the benefits derived from social capital (Fitzsimmons and Callan, 2016). #power #pursuit-of-knowledge #experience
Whereas a private sector firm’s goal is profit maximisation, a public-sector organisation [like the NHS] usually has goals of maximising efficiency, minimising costs, and maximising societal value. #business #efficiency #productivity
The short-term nature of politics has meant that in the absence of any desire to make real long-term improvements to the NHS, instead a series of immediate structural changes have been implemented to at least give the impression of change. Quite often these reforms are not evidence based and, more tellingly, are not evaluated properly. The instant gratification of an easily implementable structural change taking precedence over any better options. #change #systems-thinking
No matter what reforms are implemented, the lines of accountability for the NHS still end up with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and, by proxy the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). This means that there is a constant pressure to centralise control despite the impossibility of managing such an enormous organisation from the centre (Browne and Young, 2002; Walshe, 2003). This centralised control is facilitated by the funding of the NHS from general taxation and provides a valuable lever over its management (Greener, 2006). #accountability #responsibility #roles-and-responsibilities #control
How CEOs leave their jobs is relevant to why they leave as not all CEO turnover events are equal.
Whilst it might be expected that such prior experience would be positively associated with post-succession performance because of the job-specific human capital that the CEO brings with them, in fact the results show that whilst the stock market reacts favourably to successor CEOs with prior CEO experience (Elsaid et al., 2011), a successor CEO with prior CEO experience has poorer post-succession organisational performance than those without prior CEO experience (Zhang, 2008; Elsaid et al., 2011; Bragaw and Misangyi, 2015; Hamori and Koyuncu, 2015). Despite this, CEOs are increasingly being hired into similar roles to the ones they previously held so boards must believe that job-specific human capital is important and transferable (Hamori and Koyuncu, 2015). These findings are attributed to a negative transfer of human capital (Elsaid et al., 2011). This means that successor CEOs need to unlearn entrenched beliefs and habits before they can be effective in their new role. Bragaw and Misangyi (2015) even found that increased length of prior CEO experience was negatively correlated to the negative learning effect in the new role. #learning
Zhu and Shen (2016) suggest that a CEO’s prior experience with board diversity will affect not only the performance of the firm following the succession, but also the propensity for further CEO turnover and director turnover. They find evidence to support the view that the more diverse the hiring firm’s board is compared to the successor CEO’s previous board, the greater the likelihood of post-succession CEO and director turnover, and the lower the post-succession organisational financial performance. In this study, board diversity is a composite of board members’ 50 age, ethnicity, education, gender, functional expertise, industry background, and whether they attended an Ivy League school, that is, it goes a step further than other studies that look at these things in isolation #diversity #privilege
My research has highlighted the importance of social capital in determining CEO tenure and exit destinations. In particular, it has highlighted how the labour market for CEOs is not working effectively to reward good performance, but is instead penalising poor performance to such an extent that good CEOs may be put off from moving to other trusts. This means that good CEOs are not sharing their ability across the system, as they might otherwise have done if the labour market were working more effectively. Poor performing trusts are thus unable to attract good CEOs and enter a spiral of decline #compound-interest #equity #regulation