Open Access

In this dissertation, I focus on the link between (internal) corporate governance structures and processes and firms financial reporting quality. Specifically, the dissertation aims to provide insights into the following general research question: What is the effect of different corporate governance stakeholders on the financial reporting quality of a firm? I provide insights into this question through three different articles. While Chapter 2 and 3 of this dissertation are concerned with company owners as one, albeit diverse, group of stakeholders, Chapter 4 focuses on managers and their ability to influence firm outcomes. The paper Do Family Firms Engage in Less Earnings Management? A Meta- Analysis, which is co-authored with Tim Hasso and Dominik Wagner, explores the relationship between family firm status and earnings management and synthesizes and explains previous research findings with the help of meta-analytic methods that are still uncommon in financial accounting research. We find a negative relationship between family firms and earnings management on average across 37 primary studies (and 305 effect sizes in total). Furthermore, we show that the considerable variation in size and direction of primary effect sizes can be explained by researchers choice of study design, earnings management proxy and different institutional settings. The paper Do Institutional Owners Deter Earnings Management? A Meta- Analysis, which is co-authored with Tim Hasso, explores institutional owners as a different set of shareholders and their impact on financial reporting quality. The study enables us to compare the results against the backdrop of the previous chapter and to see different rationales that managers in institutionally-owned companies might have to engage in earnings management. Here, we study 511 effect sizes from a total of 87 primary studies and find that the average effect is slightly negative, meaning institutional owners on average can get more transparent earnings figures from the companies they invest in. Similar to the work we did on family firms, we find considerable heterogeneity between results from primary studies. Specifically, our multivariate meta-regression models can explain 26 percent of the variability in effect sizes, mainly attributable to study design choices, such as how scholars measure the relevant constructs of ownership and earnings management. Conversely, this also indicates that across the 87 primary studies looking at the link between institutional ownership and earnings management, 74 percent of heterogeneity in effect sizes is still not explained. The single-author paper The Fish Rots From the Head Down: Managerial Personality and Financial Accounting Manipulation is concerned with managers - the second main stakeholder in corporate governance - and how managerial personality drives the propensity to engage in fraudulent accounting activities. I use a primary sample of 956 professionals, who work in accounting and finance departments, and ask them to rate their immediate superior on dark triad personality traits, as well as common actions taken by management to obscure and manipulate earnings figures. I find that managers with high ratings for dark triad personality traits engage to a greater extent in fraudulent accounting practices, than managers scoring low on the dark triad scale. Moreover, I can show that traditional risk management mechanisms, like internal audit departments, are only partially effective. Specifically, I find that only internal audit departments that are fully staffed by external personnel can curb the adverse effect of dark triad managers on financial reporting quality. This suggests that managers with dark personalities can take advantage of mixed or entirely in-house internal audit departments. Overall, this dissertation contributes significantly to both literature streams of corporate governance and financial reporting quality. My work can explain a significant degree of heterogeneity in previous findings on the link between different kinds of ownership and earnings management. Further, it stresses that the considerable variation in current findings is not mainly attributable to cross-country differences, as previously suggested, but in no small part attributable to study design features. Both meta-analysis papers are among the first articles that apply advanced metaregression methods in the financial accounting literature. Thus, contrary to previous methods of research synthesis meta-analyses are uniquely able to draw systematic, quantitative and replicate conclusions from a body of academic research. Especially for large, mature literature strands taking stock of all findings on a specific relationship is valuable, as research rarely progresses one paper at a time. Condensing and differentiating cumulative research via meta-analysis is thus a valuable contribution to the field and can be a basis for further theory development and improvements in empirical study designs. Finally, I can provide additional evidence on current research linking executive personality traits and financial reporting practices. Asking practitioners directly about their assessment of managerial personality and the frequency of specific fraudulent actions helped to show the critical role of executive personality and complements recent archival and experimental findings. The survey design also enables me to study so far undetected fraud, which is almost impossible to examine with experimental or archival data and thus a significant contribution to existing literature. Finding links between managerial personality, internal controls and reporting quality contributes to the literature further, as it shows previously unhypothesized relationships that can serve as a basis for future research on the effectiveness of internal audit functions in preventing fraud given different managerial personality traits.

Over the last decades corporate irresponsibility has gained increasing interest among practitioners and researchers. Corporate irresponsibility is often the result of intentionally irresponsible strategies, decisions, or actions, which negatively affect an identifiable stakeholder or environment. For instance, these range from the violation of the human rights and labor standards to environmental damages. Organizations enacting irresponsible practices rely on different factors upon multiple levels (field, organizational, individual) and its interrelations as well as processes evolving within the organization leading to such behavior. However, reasons for the occurrence of and explanations for corporate irresponsibility so far have been limited, leaving a fragmented understanding of this phenomenon. This dissertation helps to improve the understanding and explanation of corporate irresponsibility by identifying driving patterns of corporate irresponsibility and showing how the interactions across multiple levels add to this phenomenon. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the topic of corporate irresponsibility, the theoretical approaches of this dissertation and an introduction to the chapters. The second chapter offers a review and analysis of the corporate irresponsibility literature. The chapter presents a variance model outlining the concept, antecedents, moderators and outcomes of recent corporate irresponsibility literature as well as the different factors across levels (field, organizational, individual). Chapter 2 offers a critical analysis of what we know by referring to current literature and offers insights on what we don´t know by deriving main implications for future research on corporate irresponsibility. Chapter 3 enlarges the understanding of corporate irresponsibility introducing a process approach to explain how corporate irresponsibility evolves over time and under which conditions. Based on a qualitative meta-analysis findings converge around two distinct process paths of corporate irresponsibility, the opportunistic-proactive, and, the emerging-reactive, subdivided into three phases. Chapter 3 sheds different lights upon the phases of corporate irresponsibility and its underlying mechanisms. The final chapter 4 focuses on different underlying mechanisms driving the final downfall or demise of organizations, organizational failure. Chapter 4 offers an alternative explanation to the competing extremism and inertia mechanisms driving organizational failure in recent studies by suggesting that these explanations are rather complementary. In addition, chapter 4 enlarges the explanation of organizational failure identifying the role of conflict mechanisms and its interplay with rigidity mechanisms. In sum, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of what causes and increases corporate irresponsibility, and a better explanation of how and why corporate irresponsibility and organizational failure emerges, develops, grows or terminates over time. Hopefully all three articles motivate more research on this important topic to prevent such behavior in advance. 4

This dissertation analyses external appointees and successions on boards and consists of three papers which are all empirical in nature. It provides insights into the present literature from a meta-perspective, enlarges the understanding of external successions to German executive bank boards and extends the rare number of studies on the internal supervisory bodies of bank institutions. The first paper with the title, ´Outside successions and performance consequences: A meta-analysis´, highlights the existing literature to which essential parts of this dissertation contribute. Conducting a literature search process, the paper aggregates 102 empirical results from 28 journal articles and working papers published between 1990 and 2017. The meta-analysis focuses on how researchers address the build-in issue that outsiders are not randomly assigned to firms. The results reveal that the relationship of outside successions and performance varies significantly with the methodological characteristics of the original studies. The following two papers concentrate on successions in banking institutions. More specifically, the second study, ´Do all new brooms sweep clean? Evidence for outside bank appointments´, examines the appointments of executive directors external to the bank and the consequences of that appointment on bank performance. The study addresses in particular alternative explanations, i.e. outside selection and/or joint endogeneity, while examining external executive appointments and their consequences on bank performance. The second empirical paper lend significant support to the view that some outsiders are better predisposed to helping the bank turn around poor performance and that the selected proxies of managerial ability, which are based on the historical return on assets and risk-return efficiency measured at outsiders´ former banks, are able to identify such good outsiders. Finally, the third paper with the title, ´Experienced members of the supervisory board. Who is appointed and which bank appoints?´, considers the link between the executive and the supervisory board. The study points to the conclusion that newly appointed executives to the supervisory board differ from their non-appointed counterparts with a particular set of experiences. The study provides evidence for the view that the pre-appointment financial situation, measured by several proxies of bank risk and performance, has significant influence on the decision to appoint such an experienced member to the supervisory board. This dissertation is framed by an introduction and concluding chapter where I reflect on the research questions of my empirical studies, summarize the results and identify some possibilities for future research.

Research on motivational and cognitive processes in entrepreneurship has commonly relied on a static approach, investigating entrepreneurs´ motivation and cognition at only one point in time. However, entrepreneurs´ motivation and cognition are dynamic processes that considerably change over time. The goal of this dissertation is thus to adopt a dynamic perspective on motivational and cognitive processes in entrepreneurship. In three different chapters, I examine dynamic changes in the level and impact of three different processes, i.e., creativity, entrepreneurial passion, and opportunity identification. In Chapter 2, I develop a theoretical model on the alternating role of creativity in the course of the entrepreneurial process. The model emphasizes that the effects of two components underlying creativity, i.e., divergent and convergent thinking, considerably change both in magnitude and in direction throughout the entrepreneurial process. In Chapter 3, I establish and empirically test a theoretical model on entrepreneurial passion. The theoretical analysis and empirical results show that the relationships between feelings of entrepreneurial passion, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial success are dynamic and reciprocal rather than static and unidirectional. In Chapter 4, I develop and test a theoretical model on the effect of entrepreneurship training on opportunity identification over time. The theoretical and empirical investigation indicates that entrepreneurship training effects systematically decay over time and that action planning and entrepreneurial action sustain the effects in the long term. Altogether, the research reported in this dissertation provides novel insights into entrepreneurs´ motivation and cognition which more static approaches would have obscured. Moreover, the theoretical and empirical results of each chapter resolve apparent contradictions in past research and integrate hitherto fragmented theoretical perspectives into more inclusive theoretical frameworks. Thereby, this dissertation represents an important step toward a more integrated understanding of motivational and cognitive mechanisms underlying successful entrepreneurship.