국내 상장기업 및 공공기관의 최고경영자(CEO)의 보상 구조(Compensation structure)에 대한 두 가지 연구

Abstract

기업의 경영에 있어 무엇보다도 중요한 이슈는 기업의 미래 비전을 달성하기 위한 적합한 전략설정에 있다고 할 수 있다. 그러나 기업의 전략이 아무리 체계적이고 정교하더라도 전략이 제대로 실행될 수 없다면 기업의 미래는 장담할 수 없다(지성권 외, 2014). 기업의 전략을 성공적으로 실행할 수 있도록 CEO의 전략 실천에 대한 의지가 중요하며, 또한 기업의 전략을 성공적으로 실행할 수 있도록 그에 맞는 적절한 동기부여는 반드시 필요한 것으로 보인다(지성권 외, 2014). 그러나 CEO 보상과 경영성과 사이의 연구에서 기본적인 이론인 대리인 이론(agency theory)에 따르면 소유(ownership)와 경영 분리가 위임자인 주주와 대리인 사이의 이해관계 불일치, 위험회피성향의 차이, 정보 불균형 등으로 인해 대리인 문제를 야기하게 된다는 것이다(Chen and Jermias, 2014). 이러한 대리인인 CEO는 주주에 비해 자신이 소유한 사적정보를 이용하여 자신의 효익을 극대화하기 위해 사용할 유인을 가질 수 있다는 것이다. 이러한 이유로 인하여 위임자인 주주는 효율적인 계약을 통해 대리인인 CEO와 유인보상계약을 통해 대리인 문제를 완화시킬 수 있다고 말한다(Chen and Jermias, 2014). 그러나 CEO의 보상체계는 성과에 근거하여 보상을 지급하게 되는데 이는 CEO 보상을 성과와 연계시키는 것으로 기업가치 증가와 경영성과의 향상에 긍정적으로 수행하기 어렵게 할 수 있다(Fama and Jensen, 1983). 즉, 미래 기업가치 증가에 큰 영향력이 없는 성과에 경영자가 노력을 투입하도록 설계된 CEO 보상제도는 그 운영에 있어 효과성을 달성하기 어렵다고 볼 수 있다는 것이다(Rajagopalan and Finkelstein, 1992). 이런 측면에서 CEO 보상이 기업의 미래 가치를 이끌게 될 기업전략과 연계되고, 기업전략을 효율적으로 수행할 수 있도록 경영자를 동기부여 시킬 수 있는 보상제도가 구축되고 운영되어야 한다는 것이다. 더욱이 이러한 CEO의 보상체계는 기업이 추구하는 전략과의 일치성이 가장 중요하며, 보상 설계에 기업이 어떤 전략을 추구하는지가 간과되어서는 안된다는 것이다. 결론적으로 CEO 보상이 기업이 추구하는 전략과 일치되도록 설계된다면 CEO는 노력투입을 전략의 성공적 실행과 일치시킬 수 있을 것이며, 기업 성과에도 긍정적인 영향을 미칠 수 있다고 할 수 있다(Rajagopalan and Finkelstein, 1992). 그러나 지금까지 CEO 보상연구들은 경영자 보상수준에 대한 연구들이 진행되어 왔었다. 그러나 보상수준만으로 다양한 성과변수들과의 연계성을 이해하기 부족하다고 볼 수 있다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 기업이 추구하는 전략에 따라 CEO 보상구조도 달라져야 한다는 관점에 따라 기업의 전략별 CEO 보상구조의 효과성 또한 다르기 때문에 전략실행에 맞는 CEO 보상구조를 마련해야 하며, 기업 전략과 CEO 보상구조의 불일치는 미래 기업 성과에 부정적인 영향을 미칠 수 있다고 주장하였다(Sloan, 1993; 김태수 외, 1999; 지성권, 2012). 따라서 본 연구에서는 기업의 전략인 기업의 사회적 책임(CSR)이 기업의 혁신활동에 미치는 영향에 CEO의 보상구조가 어떠한 역할을 하는지에 대한 연구를 진행하였다. 이는 기업의 CSR전략과 CEO의 보상구조의 적합성(Fix)에 따라 CSR과 혁신활동 간의 관계에 역할이 달라질 수 있기 때문이다. 더욱이 CEO의 보상구조가 다양한 모집단(Population)에서 어떠한 효과를 주는지에 대해 상장기업뿐만 아니라 공공기관을 대상으로 분리하여 연구함으로서 CEO의 보상의 다양한 역할에 대해 확장하고자 하였다. 특히, 국내 기업의 CEO보상은 2013년 말 이후부터 사업보고서에 5억원이상의 보수 받는 임원들의 개별적인 보수가 공개되어 CEO의 개별 보수에 대한 정보를 통해 보상 연구가 가능해졌다(이데일리, 2019). 또한 국내 공공기관 기관장들의 보상의 연구들은 성과가 보상에 미치는 영향에 대한 연구들이 진행되어왔다. 더욱이 공공기관 기관장들의 성과에 대한 보상 민감도에 연구는 민간기업 위주로 연구되어왔으나 공공기관 측면에서도 연구가 필요하다는 관점에서 공공기관 CEO인 기관장들의 성과보상민감도를 통한 다양한 CEO 보상연구로 확장하였다. ;1. Corporate social responsibility, innovation and CEO compensation The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on the company's innovation activities, R&D expenditure, and patent rights. CSR of Firm means that CEO or managers voluntarily or autonomously determine and faithfully carry out their original activities and projects while meeting the needs and interests of interested groups as much as possible. Moreover, recently, companies have been trying to actively implement social responsibility activities by carrying out the needs of various stakeholders, including customers, investors, employees, suppliers, competitors, governments, media, and civic groups, and switching to a strategic perspective rather than a mandatory one(Mcwilliams & Siegel, 2001). Moreover, companies are seeking the interests of society as a whole, while renewing their awareness of the environmental, ethical, social contribution and the sense of duty to take responsibility for the community(Lim Dae Kyu, 2016). These companies' CSR activities are more than cost, constraint, or philanthropy, which can be a source of opportunity, innovation, and competitive advantage(Porter and Kramer, 2006). In other words, a company's CSR should aim for innovation in products and services that are valid from a strategic perspective, discover markets that are not serviced, and build new business models(Grayson and Hodges, 2004). Therefore, in this study, the relationship between an entity's CSR activities was to be identified as the most important driver of the entity's innovation (Luo and Du, 2015) and whether the entity's CSRs have a direct impact on its innovation activities in the context of a mix of "CSR-innovation" relationships in previous studies. Therefore, in this study, the Korea Corporate Governance Serve(KGS) conducted the research by utilizing the evaluation scores of the annual ESG evaluation conducted by the Korea Corporate Governance Serve(KCGS) for listed companies as proxy variables at the level of CSR activities, thereby expanding the research on the relationship between CSR and innovation. In addition, in this study, we would like to explore how the CEO compensation (performance pay, stock performance bonus) and the CEO-TMT wage gap and the CEO-employee wage gap affect CSR activities and innovation. This is because the CEO of the entity is the highest decision maker who simultaneously manages the entity on behalf of the shareholders and is responsible for its performance. Therefore, the factors that make the strategic decision-making of the company's decision to participate in CSR can be an important factor in CSR activity(Ahn & Park. 2019). This is because the management compensation system can play an important role as a representative governance mechanism that encourages these CEOs to make decisions that contribute to the company's growth and success(Cho Young-gon and Park Chul-hyung, 2017). Moreover, communication with internal stakeholders as well as external stakeholders is important for successful corporate CSRs (Yoon Gak, Ryu Ji-young, 2012). This means that if internal stakeholders' perception of a company's CSR activities is important and they feel unfair within the company, they can undermine their efforts to cooperate with strategic goals such as CSR and innovation(Bradley et al., 1999; O’'Brien and David, 2014; Hart et al. 2015). For this reason, the study analyzed how the CEO-TMT wage gap and the CEO-employee wage gap within the entity affect the entity's CSR and innovation activities in the relationship between the entity's CSR and its innovation activities. These analysis data were analyzed for companies listed on the securities market and the KOSDAQ market for five years from 2014 to 2018, and CEO compensation data was analyzed using the public data of individual registered executives who received a remuneration of more than 500 million won for companies that were obliged to disclose the remuneration details of individual registered executives under the revision of the Capital Markets Act at the end of 2013. The analysis results are as follows, First, the higher the index of CSR activity, the higher the enterprise's CSR activity, the higher the R&D expenditure, in its relationship with the innovation activity, the higher the R&D expenditure. This means that companies' CSR activities, not costs, constraints, or charitable activities, adopt a long-term and strategic approach to CSR, and seek opportunities to develop innovative products, services and business models that contribute to social welfare and provide higher quality and more productive jobs(Navickas & Kontautiene, 2013). Therefore, the CSR of a company can be the driving force behind the company's innovative practices(Siegel, 2001; Bansal, 2005). Second, in the relationship between the CSR activities and the innovation activities of the enterprise, the CEO's performance-based pay and share-compensation pay were found to serve to further strengthen the positive relationship between both CSR activities and innovation activities, R&D spending and patent rights. This means that CEOs of companies are not compensated for the increased risk associated with social investment, and they may seek a less risky short-term alternative(Berrone and Gomez-Mejia, 2009; Al‑haer and Mahbub Zaman, 2017). Thus, it is necessary to reduce agent costs by enticing CSRs to be actively carried out to make decisions on long-term strategies. Third, the CEO-TMT wage gap has been shown to play a role in weakening the positive relationship between both corporate CSR activities and innovation activities, R&D spending, and patent rights. This suggests that the CEO and TMT's high horizontal wage imbalance structure undermines efforts to promote and cooperate with shareholder-centered individual competition(Bradley et al., 1999). Fourth, the CEO-employee wage gap has also been shown to play a role in weakening positive relationships between both corporate CSR activities and innovation activities, R&D spending, and patent rights. This means that employees perceive unfairness through a high vertical wage gap with the CEO and trust between the CEO and the employee is reduced (Cascio, 2006), and employees are weakened in cooperation, information provision, and commitment to the CEO's business, which in turn negatively affects organizational performance(Park & Kim, 2017). The contributions of the research are as follows: First, the company's CSR research was expanded by looking into patent rights, breaking away from the focus of the company's CSR on R&D spending research, which is an innovation activity of the company. Second, while the role of CEOs in the study of corporate CSR is important, previous studies have not focused on the relationship between the entity's CSR and the CEO. Therefore, it is meaningful in this study that the CSR of a company has shown that the CEO's compensation plays a significant role. Third, the CSR of a company looked from the perspective of not only the CEO but also the internal stakeholders who should cooperate and cooperate with the corporate strategy. In other words, it provided implications for the operation of an entity's CSR by stating that the positive perception of the entity's CSR is important because of the entity's TM or employee's perception.

2. Asymmetric and political connection of the performance and compensation of heads of state-run organizations This study analyzes the relationship between compensation and performance of the heads of public institutions in Korea, and can be said to be a study on the behavior of change in compensation of heads of institutions according to the direction of performance indicators. For this purpose, a total of 10 years of research were conducted on public corporations and quasi-government agencies, which are public institutions in Korea, from 2007 to 2016 and analyzed through panel analysis. Research shows that the sensitivity of performance compensation for heads of domestic public institutions is asymmetric. In other words, the compensation of the head of the agency shows a downward rigidity, indicating that the increase in the head of the agency's compensation is significant compared to the extent to which it decreases when the performance improves. This suggests that the compensation system of heads of agencies, such as performance bonuses, does not achieve the originally intended motivational effect, and is likely to serve as a factor that increases corporate costs compared to performance improvements. In particular, the performance variables showed significant downward rigidity in their management evaluation scores and gross asset return (RPOA). However, it did not appear in debt ratios and net assets. Since compensation for heads of state-run organizations is determined based on the basic salary and the ranking of management performance evaluation, compensation for heads of state-run organizations is linked to management evaluation scores, but there is a possibility of moral hazard that increases their wealth by increasing indirect compensation. In addition, the analysis of the political connection of the heads of public institutions, which is a characteristic of the heads of public institutions, showed that the downward rigidity of the heads of state-run organizations' compensation was significantly enhanced in the management evaluation score when the heads of public institutions were politically connected. However, other performance variables did not have an effect on the downward rigidity of compensation from the heads of public institutions.