How can practitioners make successful compensation possible?
The aim here is to contribute to pay theories by building up suggestions as to how practioners
can create successful compensation for the CEO and chairperson.
The research strategy in this study is a case study with a post research design with descriptive
characteristics, but is complemented with quantitative methods for developing existing
theories and models. It is thereby a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. In the
conceptual framework, agency theory is supplemented with stakeholder theory, which not
only takes shareholders into account, as suggested by the agency theory, but also employees,
clients and the public. The goals of the case study are to test the conceptual framework,
conduct an in-depth research on CEO and chairperson compensation and define and test the
different factors that affect successful compensation in the context of the Swiss banking
industry and the financial crisis, with OLS regression. Public information on UBS and Credit
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Suisse is studied, and is supplemented by semi-structured interviews, as archival data cannot
adequately capture the nuances underlying the compensation decisions (Gomez-Mejia, 1994).
The public documents include corporate governance reports, annual reports, companies’
internet pages and the stock market.