Empirical Research On The Impact Of The Listed Companies’Managers’ Background Characteristics On The Corporate Performance

What the top managers should do to make the company thriving and developing has been a concern for a long time. It is a common phenomenon that some of the company’s overall performance is much better than the other companies when they are faced with similar opportunities and threats. Especially when in the poor conditions, some of the companies can still keep the high profit. More and more researchers are focusing on the content and style of the strategy that the managers carry out,rather than the progress of the strategy itself. That means the managers’ management and entrepreneurship can largely determines the enterprises’ growth and performance as an important strategic resources. As the research continues, some scholars introduce demography, psychology and other knowledge to explain some behaviors of the managers, trying to research in the perspective of the behavioral characteristics of the managers, and have developed the upper echelons theory.However, the research based on the upper echelons theory is mainly in the western social and cultural background and standard, orderly market environment. So the conclusions had significant regional characteristics. This paper further expand the space of the upper echelons theory in the transformation of our social background.This paper develops a comprehensive theoretical model through the absorption of the present research production. Based on the upper echelons theory as our study perspective, this research tries to explore the relationship between managers’ age, working experiences, educational background, tenure,part-time and organization performance.This paper firstly reviewed the national and foreign literatures about the relationship between the managers’ background characteristics and corporate performance, mainly from two aspects:the manager itself and top management team.Secondly, based on the statistical method of the upper echelons theory, this paper divided the managers’ background into several characteristic, such as age, working experiences, educational background, tenure, part-time. The author tried to explain these factors have an influence on enterprise performance, and put forward the model and hypothesis of empirical research. Finally, according to the mixed cross-sectional data of2298listed companies in Shenzhen and Shanghai from the year2009to2012, the author tested the hypothesis with SPSS software. What should be noted is that, other than the upper echelons theory mostly focused on western mature market background, different industry and enterprises have different goals and performance. Therefore, after taking a total return sample, this paper took regression analysis of the sub-samples. The results show that:1. The positive correlation between the age and the corporate performance has been proved in the state-owned samples and the traditional industry samples. Namely, the older the manage get, the better the company performs.2. The outside managers can bring better performance to the company.3.The managers with science and engineering education background bring better performance than with other education background.4.The relationship between managers’ tenures and organizational performances is not significant. This is different from the previous literature. The possible explanation is that other than foreign enterprise managers have a long tenure, domestic listed companies managers only have a short tenure. So it is hard to find a significant inherent rule.5.Although the part-time behavior of managers impact on corporate performance was not proved in the total sample. But managers of part-time behavior had significant negative relationship with the enterprise performance in the sub-samples.Based on Chinese special system background, this paper focuses on the influence rules between managers’ background characteristics and organization performance. This paper puts forward suggestions and enlightenment to individuals、 companies and government on the basis of the influence rules. This paper is only an exploratory start, there are many aspects of the research methods and theory frame should be deepened and improved.