Question

Need assistance responding to this discussion post in personal opinion.

You’ll find that managers are also the shareholder or the owner of a company. In these cases, the shareholders interests line up with the goal of the firm. Technically, what benefits the company would also benefit the shareholder. You’ll also see that when the shareholder or owner is not playing the manager role, there’s a disconnect between both the shareholder and manager’s interest (Stout, 2002). The manager usually would make decisions based off of what will benefit him instead of the firm’s success. An example of this would be when a manager is spending the corporate credit card to buy non-business uses of an event. This lack of connect between the shareholder and manager’s interest is called agency problem. The unnecessary use of non-business purpose on the company’s credit card or expense can decrease the profitability of that firm. Poor performing companies have been built to take extensive defense against takeovers. When a takeover defense is made, this action triggers the defenses. When a takeover takes places, management are usually first to exit their roles in the firm. What usually increases the agency problem is putting in place a takeover defense that are not related to managerial packages. For example, continuance of underperforming will not be resulting in job loss or security. Therefore, managers are more than likely to put themselves first in this type of companies. These managers in takeover defense firms would have to put in the extra work for lower pay and also avoid such actions that can be damaging to the company.

Answer 1

While stockholders and business managers are primarily concerned with the profit performance of the business in which they are shareholders, they have inherent conflict of interests.The conflicts between stockholders and the managers of a business include the following:

The more money that managers make in wages and benefits, the less stockholders see in bottom-line net income. Stockholders obviously want the best managers for the job, but they don’t want to pay any more than they have to. In many corporations, top-level managers, for all practical purposes, set their own salaries and compensation packages.A public business corporation establishes a compensation committee consisting of outside directors that sets the salaries, incentive bonuses, and other forms of compensation of the top-level executives of the organization. An outside director is one who has no management position in the business and who, therefore, should be more objective and should not be beholden to the chief executive of the business.The question of who should control the business — managers, who are hired for their competence and are intimately familiar with the business, or stockholders, who may have no experience relevant to running this business but whose money makes the business tick — can be tough to answer.

In my opinion Stockholders should take care to align their own goals with the goals of their managers. One of the simplest ways to do this is to pay managers partially in stock, making them stockholders themselves who have an interest in seeing the company succeed.