Top Management Team Characteristics And Corporate Performance

Agricultural industrialization is the direction of the development of modern agriculture; the leadingenterprise is the key to promote the industrialization of agriculture, while agricultural Listed Companiesare the leading of the leading enterprises. Therefore, it is a very important practical significance whetherfor promoting agricultural industrialization and rapid development, and modern agriculturalconstruction, or for increasing peasants’ employment and income to make agriculture-related listedcompanies bigger and stronger. Top management team in the agriculture-related listed companies is theformulation of corporate strategy, whose decision-making will influent the companies’ rise and fall, andwhose strategy-implementing will determine the corporate performance. To some extent, it depends onthe demographic characteristics of the entire team whether the top management team makes the rightstrategy and the good effect of its execution or not. For these reasons, this paper makes the demographiccharacteristics of the top management team as a breakthrough to study its impact on the performance ofagriculture-related listed companies.Take86agriculture-related listed companies listed in Shanghai stock exchange and Shenzhen stockexchange from2004to2010as research samples, this paper divides the demographic characteristics ofthe top management team variables into non-heterogeneity variables and heterogeneity variables, andmakes regression analysis of unbalanced panel data through the creation of econometric models. Inaddition, based on the realities of the regional imbalance of economic development in China, theindicator of market-oriented process is added into the econometric models to study the relationshipbetween the demographic characteristics of top management team and the performance ofagriculture-related listed companies under the influence of the indicator of market-oriented processthrough the interaction of the demographic characteristics variables and the market-oriented processindicator.Empirical test results show that: in China’s agriculture-related listed companies, there is asignificant positive correlation between the average age and the sex ratio of the top management teamnon-heterogeneity variables and corporate performances. And there is a significant negative correlationbetween the interaction variable of political association and market index and corporate performances.There is a very significant positive correlation between educational level heterogeneity and itsinteraction variable with the market index and corporate performances. While the remaining variables,such as the average level of education, the average tenure, the interaction of the average age and themarket index variable, the interaction variable of age heterogeneity and market index did not pass asignificant test. Given the similarity of the sample companies and their locations, the process ofmarketization and the lower the level of the industries in which the process of marketization of thestatus quo, the indicator of the market-oriented process in this part make a little reduction to therelationship between part of demographic characteristics,(such as average age, political association, ageheterogeneity and the heterogeneity of education level) and corporate performances and, but the effect isnot obvious. But this also reflects, to some extent, the effectiveness of market-oriented reforms inChina. Finally, discussion is made on the test results based on the characteristics of China’s marketeconomy development as well as agriculture-related industries and recommendations are put forward onthe problem related to build the top management team in agricultural listed companies to provide thebasis for decision making on improving the operational performance, optimizing the corporategovernance structure and maximizing the value of the companies.