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This study reviews several decades of research on the topic of executive background, defined here as the total of an executive's “experience, knowledge, and education.” We consider work from both management and nonmanagement sources and from both macro and micro sources within management. Our review of 216 published empirical articles is structured around a series of widely studied executive background characteristics and categories, including tenure, functional background, knowledge and education, outsider/insider status, other professional experiences, and experiences outside the workplace. This narrative review is underpinned and informed by an inductively derived framework comprised of five key dimensions that represent distinct ways in which specific experiences can be conceptualized: visibility, timing, frequency, discreteness, and agency. We conclude our narrative review with a quantitative, bibliometric analysis illustrating some of the key patterns within the most recent work in this domain. Finally, we use the insights arising from our review to provide a set of theoretical and methodological recommendations for future work in this area.

We draw on the political institutions approach and relational embeddedness perspective to advance a relational theory of policy risk. We argue that policy risk negatively affects acquisition completion, but the strength of the effect is dependent on home-host country relations. Home-host country relations underpin host governments' motivation to commit to policies and

We test hypotheses derived from resource dependence and sensemaking/sensegiving theoretical lenses in the context of CEO succession, focusing on an under‐researched yet prevalent type of executive turnover – CEO retirement. Using event study methodology and a sample of CEO retirements from S&P 1500 firms during the 2003–12 period, we find that, all else equal, shareholders’ perceptions of organizations’ capacity to serve their interests are adversely affected when a retirement related change occurs in the leadership structure. Specifically, in line with resource dependence theory, we find that CEO retirement disclosures typically generate negative abnormal returns. Furthermore, in line with the sensemaking perspective, we find that the magnitude of shareholders’ reactions is contingent on the lexical sensegiving cues contained in the organizational narratives that are released to capital markets via executive retirement announcements. Overall, our theory and results point to CEO retirement events as consequential in the eyes of shareholders, challenging an important assumption of extant succession research. Moreover, they suggest that shareholders’ interpretation of these events is influenced by organizational sensegiving, highlighting the important role of organizational communication around succession events.