Top management team meetings and firm performance

Purpose: How do shareholders know if corporate managers are doing their jobs? This paper aims to propose using top management team meetings as a measure of the behavior of company managers. More meetings may indicate effective effort by top management to enhance company performance. Alternatively, more meetings may reflect procrastination and decision paralysis. Design/methodology/approach: Using top management team meeting data publicly disclosed by Indonesian companies during 2010–2017, this study tests for these hypothesized relationships between top management team meeting frequency and firm performance. Findings: This study found that top management team meetings are positively related to firm performance, indicating that more meetings do represent more effective effort by top management teams. Further analysis shows that only firms that consistently hold more meetings than their peers perform better, particularly during periods of poor performance. Originality/value: This study highlights top management team meetings as a valid signal of management effort and suggests there should be louder calls for disclosure of these types of executive performance metrics around the world.