Contact: Dr. Edward J. Coyne, 205-726-2041, ejcoyne@samford.edu

CEO turnover and its effect upon the top management team

"Surviving (and Succeeding with) Your New CEO," an article by the father and son research team of Samford Business assistant professor, Dr. Edward J. Coyne, Sr., and Kevin P. Coyne, professor at Harvard Business School, is scheduled to appear in the May 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review.

According to their research, the average top executive team of a public company has a 48 percent chance of getting a new CEO in the next four years. And, that doesn't take into account the 25,000 teams whose companies will be acquired in that same time period. Thus, in the next four years, the careers of the majority of top executives will suddenly be put in the hands of someone they barely know or perhaps someone they have never heard of. How worried should they be about keeping their jobs? What are the real odds of being pushed out or demoted? If executives are pushed out, do they tend to land on their feet or do they fall dramatically? And most importantly, if executives do want to survive and succeed, what should they do differently?

The article combines the first deep statistical research on the fate of such executives with the practical advice of over 20 CEOs who have determined the fates of their executive team members during one or more transitions. Of particular interest are lessons from the fate of those executives who "turned the CEO's first impression around"--for better or worse.

Contact: Dr. Charles M. Carson, 205-726-4460, cmcarson@samford.edu

Research addresses measuring conflict between work and family life

Dr. Charles M. (Chad) Carson, Samford Business Assistant Professor of Management, along with colleagues at the University of South Alabama and the University of Southern Mississippi, develop and validate two new measures of Perceived Work Demand (PWD) and Perceived Family Demand (PFD) in the upcoming issue of Educational and Psychological Measurement — a leading cross-discipline testing and measurement journal.

Dr. Carson reveals the key findings of the research: "We found that PWD scores predicted the work interfering with family conflict and that family interfering with work conflict could be predicted by scores on the PFD scale. Developing these scales gives managers and human resources professionals the tools necessary to identify conflict situations and hopefully prevent that conflict from damaging both the work and home life of employees."