How relevant is this story to what has happened so far? In the United States, as Piketty himself stresses, soaring inequality has to date been largely been driven by labor income – by “supermanagers” (I prefer superexecutives.)
Something that I've been considering as I take management classes is that it seems that a well managed firm should end up developing a strong espirit de corps and a great deal of management loyalty in the company. Companies should end up with long term employees and management that will oppose stockholder efforts to extract revenue from the company instead of using it to serve employees. Psychological characteristics and organizational behavior should be leading companies to have an in group of employees opposed to the out group of stockholders.
Yet, instead, we've seen labor share of income decline and record breaking profits. Despite the performance advantages of developing strong employee morale and loyalty companies seem prone to emphasizing staffing cuts and biased towards hiring more aggressive, less loyal employees to the expense of a strong corporate culture.
A possible explanation is that stockholders recognize that strong employee cultures can be against their interests. This forces them to compensate top management extravagantly in order to encourage them to identify with stockholders instead of the corporation they run and to engage in business practices which weaken the corporation in the long run in favor of higher profits now.
This tension ultimately results from the fact that there is no reason why the corporate entity should have any preference for what sort of capital funds it or who is providing it while there is a strong mutual identification amongst the employees of an organization. In turn, providers of capital have no reason to have a preference over which corporate entity receives their funds, with only some minor restrictions they can quickly and easily trade their stock for that of other corporations. Overcoming this difference in commitment requires capital to pay large bribes if it wants to extract wealth from companies. This also helps explain how common restructurings are despite a poor record of giving expected returns as well as a tendency for boards to hire in outsiders despite insiders with better knowledge of the company.
Examples of this would be a number of managers that have been hired to break strong, successful corporate cultures which led to market dominance and stable performance but relatively weak returns to shareholders. HP and Carly Fiorina being the textbook example from my classes.
[Cross-posted at Angry Bear]
This is very enlightening indeed. I never understood why shareholders accept paying so much to their executives. This was a bit of an eye opener. It may also have to do with the type of shareholders existent nowadays. There are a lot of institutional investors, but not only. Would you care to comment on this?
ReplyDeleteIt's something to think about, but I don't know a whole lot about institutional investors. My first take on it is that institutional investors are likely to make the issue worse since they tend to target more formal metrics and are less likely to dig too deep into the idiosyncrasies of a given company than a wealthy individual investor. By targeting these measures they are likely to push managers in the direction of targeting these measures as well and thus reward managers appropriately.
DeleteBut this is something I'll have to think a bit more about, that's just my first take on it.