The Nature Of Property Rights, Background Characteristics Of Managers And Enterprise Performance

In the modern corporate governance structure, ownership and management separated from each other, there are principal-agent problems between owners and managers, and owners’constraint on the behavior of managers is limited. Although the traditional theories, such as principal-agent theory, asymmetric information theory and behavioral finance theory have made great contributions on researching corporate governance issues. However, along with the deepening of theoretical studies, scholars have found that the research results of the traditional theories can not explain managers’ behavior characteristics manifested in the management process, such as overinvestment, underinvestment and strategic preferences. And these traditional classical theories still exist space to complement, enrich and improve. Therefore, some scholars try to apply knowledge of psychology, demography and behavioral economics in the field of management research, and begin to research questions from the perspective of managers’ behavioral characteristics, then produced a new theoretical research system, which is called "high-rise echelon theory". Psychology and demography theory point out that background characteristics, such as gender, age, academic, speciality have an important impact on learning and mastering new knowledge, thereby affecting human behaviors. Higher-rise echelon theory thinks that business is a reflection of corporate managers, managers are limited rational and subject to a variety of behavior factors, their individual characteristics affect the degree of understanding and grasping the internal and external environment, and the master based on individual characteristics have an impact on making specific strategic and management process, thereby affecting business performance.High-rise echelon theory provides a new thinking for studying the relationship between managers and organization performance, it supplements and perfects the traditional theories. So that the research on managers’ background characteristics becomes a hotspot in the field of corporate governance research recently. However, there are two aspects of inadequate in related researches:on one hand, High-rise echelon theory has originated in the market environment of the United States which is highly institutionalized and standardized, the highly standardized and relatively stable business environment can forecast managers’ behavior effectively. Previous researches focus on the social systems and cultural backgrounds highly regulated western developed countries, but for the lower regular and higher dynamic emerging market economic entity are insufficient. On the other hand, paying attention to China, most existing researches focus on the senior management team, there is not outstanding research on the relationship between the supreme leader in company and organization performance.The insufficient of previous research provides us with the opportunity to further study. In this paper, combined with the basic national conditions of our country and the status of corporate governance structure, we put the nature of property rights, the general managers’background characteristics and corporate performance into an analytical framework. And then we firstly verify how the general managers’background characteristics influence on the corporate performance. second, we research whether the general managers’background characteristics can pass through the nature of property rights effect on the corporate performance and how much the degree of influence between these variables and the corporate performance. In the first place, the article reviews the content on related issues, and analyses the development of property rights theory, principal-agent theory, high-rise echelon theory and entrepreneurial social capital theory. This article is based on high-rise echelon theory, but property rights theory and entrepreneurial social capital theory provide a new analysis perspective for studying the relationship between the general managers’ background characteristics and the corporate performance. In the second place, synthesizing related theoretical basis and the existing empirical research findings, we create the framework, ideas and conceptual mode of the relationship among the nature of property rights, the general managers’ background characteristics and the corporate performance, and then propose hypotheses. Finally, according to the mixed cross-sectional data of6678A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from the year2005-2012, we complete on the empirical descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and finish the empirical test about the hypotheses with the stata12SE software. It should be pointed out that, the general managers’ background characteristics data is obtained according to the CSMAR database, listing corporation website, company annual reports and Sina Financial Network to provide executive resume manual coding.The research found that there is a significant positive correlation of age, education, and tenure of general managers’ background characteristics to the corporate performance. The older general managers not only have a richer life experiences, company knowledge and experience, but also have a greater advantage in accessing to resources and information resources, so the greater the age, corporate performance will be better. General managers’ job is a highly complex labor process, the general managers who received a good education not only have a stronger information gathering and processing capabilities, richer knowledge base and obtain more important resources and information through social networks, so general managers of higher education, business performance will be better. With the tenure increases, general managers become more familiar with the subjective and objective environment, market conditions and the company’s business which the company faced, and accumulate a wealth of business operational skills, have a high risk of affordability and can quickly identify development opportunities, so the longer the tenure, corporate performance will be better. General Managers accepted science and engineering education have more obvious advantages in the optimization of business processes, technology innovation, the ability of integrating and optimizing information and network resources, the ability of marketing. Therefore, in the highly dynamic and competitive market environment, general managers who accepted science and engineering education, corporate performance will be better; With the rapid development of China’s market economy and the transformation of social attitudes, more and more women play a key role in important positions of the organization through their own efforts, we know that women are inclined to take initiative change and bear innovative way of thinking in the treatment of organizational change and its measures, they are active to participate company activities, which produced a better incentive and supervisory role in business decision-making. At the same time, women are born affinity and higher interpersonal sensitivity. In order to get promotion opportunities, they take more effort than men, so women general managers for the enterprise will achieve better results than the general manager for the men’s business.In addition, the study also found that the interaction between the nature of property rights and the age has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between general managers’age and corporate performance. General managers in the state-owned enterprises, with the age increases, the thinking from start to finish increases, they tend to keep occupational safety and risk aversion, which causes corporate innovation decrease and hard to grasp good opportunities for development. Therefore, compared with the non-state-owned enterprises, the older general managers in the state-owned holding enterprises, the performance will be worse. The interaction between the nature of property rights and education has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between general managers’ education and corporate performance. That is to say, compared with the non-state-owned enterprises, state-owned holding enterprise managers who have a higher education, corporate performance will be better. But the nature of the property does not play a regulatory role between gender and enterprise performance.This article is based on high-rise echelon theory, at the same time,it fully absorb the research results of property rights theory, the principal-agent theory and social capital theory. It also considers the special situation of our country, institutional factors and unique cultural background, so that the space of high-rise echelon theory have been perfect and rich. In the meantime, it has an important theoretical and practical significance in the applicability of regulation and limitations for property rights theory. Simultaneously, the study enriches the relevant research literature on the relationship between background characteristics and corporate performance. We distinct the state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises, studying the background characteristics how to influence corporate performance, such as gender, age, education, speciality and tenure, it is good for analyzing the contribution of different elements for corporate performance and making appropriate strategy to improve their overall competitiveness. The nature of property rights play a significant regulatory role between managers background characteristics and corporate performance. It provides a significant role in guiding and useful reference for selecting and training China’s listed companies managers. It also contributes the strategic analysis and predict strategy decision-makers of competitors’, and then adjust the corporate strategy behavior accordingly.