1. Introduction
"The new continental European banking culture should value long-term thinking instead of short-termism and financial alchemy" (Horst Kohler, former German Federal President, 2008).
In the face of the global financial (subprime) crisis which is reasoned to be brought about largely by excessive short-term thinking, societal expectations towards corporate executives to live up to their stewardship roles and long-term responsibilities have increased dramatically. As a consequence, the issue of how to curb short-term orientation has risen not only to the top of political agendas worldwide but has also become most prominent in the scientific and practical discourse in the area of corporate governance (e.g., Dallas 2012).
Even before the financial crisis, several initiatives have been launched dedicated to reasserting long-term orientation in business decision-making and investing. For instance, in the U.S., a number of prominent firms, including Pfizer Inc, PepsiCo, and Xerox Corporation, agreed to subscribe to a set of guiding principles (Aspen Principles) meant to enforce greater long-term orientation in their corporate activities. These and other initiatives are largely driven by the concern about an excessive short-term orientation of corporate executives of publicly listed companies. Short-term orientation--or often termed short-termism--is defined as the excessive focus of corporate executives, investors, and analysts on short-term quarterly earnings at the expense of long-term corporate strategy, performance, and sustainability (Porter 1992; Sappideen 2011; Stein 1988).
But despite these initiatives and the evidently harmful effects of short-term orientation on long-term firm performance and survival, more than 75% of chief financial officers (CFOs) acknowledge choosing investments with lower net present value (NPV) due to a shorter payoff horizon (Graham et al. 2005). Today, top management teams (TMT) face a major dilemma in respect to long-term oriented behavior. Recent management surveys have shown that average tenure of CEOs in major publicly listed Western European corporations is approximately four years (Lucier et al. 2006). This number is expected to decrease further over the next few years--not least due to a lack of trust and growing impatience of shareholders with corporate executives. In today's business environment, CEOs thus seem to have few incentives to take long-term oriented measures as CEOs are very unlikely to actually reap the benefits of long-term oriented measures given their continuously shorter tenure.
Conversely, against the backdrop of shorter CEO tenure, short-term oriented behavior seems to be associated with higher gains for CEOs. However, what has often been left ill-considered is that this only holds true if these short-term measures do not 'backfire' within the CEO's own tenure in the particular firm. For instance, managerial opportunism theory has argued that short-term behavior might be an optimal choice from a manager's perspective. Using moral hazard models, it has been shown that managers prefer short-term investments that pay off quickly to enhance personal reputation (Campbell, Marino 1994; Narayanan 1985), or that managers are preoccupied with job safety and therefore favour short-term relative to long-term payoffs (Hirshleifer, Thakor 1992). These views, however, do not consider any negative backlash effects of such short-term behavior within the CEO's approximately three to four year long tenure in the particular firm.
In essence, CEOs of large publicly listed firms today are not so much concerned about either the short-term or the long-term. Instead, CEOs are most of all interested in maximizing financial returns over their expected three to four year tenure period. What is of primary interest to them are thus the medium-term performance implications of short-term and long-term oriented behavior. This strong interest in the medium-term performance implications has been spurred by the fact that many compensation and bonus schemes nowadays have a build-in holding period for shares or options of usually three to four years. …