Frequent executive turnover and accounting information quality
Authors: Li Valerie , Wang Lin 
Published: November 2024

Purpose

Executive turnover has increased in recent years. Most studies of executive turnover focus on CEO turnover and treat each incident of turnover as an isolated event. This research considers both CEO and CFO turnover and investigates whether the frequency of executive turnover has distinct effects on financial reporting quality.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors use a sample of firms extracted from Execucomp from the 1992 to 2021 period and examine three important indicators of firm’s accounting information quality: earning persistence; earnings informativeness; and accrual earnings management.

Findings

The authors find that higher frequency of executive turnovers in a 5-year period is associated with lower financial reporting quality. Specifically, the authors find that the frequency of executive turnovers is negatively associated with earnings persistence and positively associated with accrual earnings management, especially income-increasing accrual earnings management. Furthermore, the authors find that the frequencies of CEO-only turnover and combined CEO and CFO turnover, but not CFO-only turnover, are negatively associated with earnings informativeness about future cash flows. In addition, the authors find some evidence that promoting executives internally weakens the negative effect of frequent executive turnover on financial reporting quality.

Practical implications

The results suggest that while change is sometimes inevitable, frequent executive changes can create a short-horizon problem and make the realization of adaptation effects of leadership change difficult, and hence hurt company’s performance. The study suggests that organizations, especially corporate board should have robust and effective change management systems and strategies in place, which can help to mitigate the negative effect of frequent executive changes and align firms’ operations with the new leadership’s vision, maintain operational continuity, and employee engagement during periods of transition.

Originality/value

The study contributes to the management turnover literature by examining the impact of executive turnover frequency on firms’ financial reporting quality. While previous studies primarily rely on binary variables to measure management turnover, this study is among the first that focuses on the frequency of executive turnover, thus capturing more nuanced information beyond the scope of a binary variable. This measure allows the authors to focus on the disruptive effect of executive turnover, and hence better disentangles the distinct effects that multiple executive turnovers have on firm performance, which can differ from the effect of individual turnover. This distinction is crucial because the adaptation effect from executive turnover may not have adequate time to materialize within the context of several short executive tenures. The authors provide evidence that the disruptive effect manifests more strongly in firms with a higher rate of executive turnover and such disruption deteriorates firms’ financial reporting quality.