Hamstrung CEOs: The perils and boundary conditions

Although a CEO is assumed to be the most powerful executive in the top management team (TMT), this assumption does not always hold. In this study, I focus on the largely ignored phenomenon of hamstrung CEOs, defined as CEOs with very low power—more specifically, CEOs who are not the most powerful TMT member. With a sample from the U.S. computer hardware industry, I found that hamstrung CEOs were negatively associated with firm performance, and...