Managerial Cognitive Moral Development and the Firm's Owners' Salience: Empirical Evidence

In this paper, we study the agency relationship between the firm’s owners and managers. We apply the theory of Cognitive Moral Development (CMD) to answer the question: what factors affect salience of the interests of the firm’s owners to the managers? Using a sample of Russian managers, we found that higher levels of CMD weaken the relationship between the owners’ perceived urgency and the owners’ salience and strengthen the relationship between the owners’ perceived power and the owners’ salience. We also found that managerial CMD is positively associated with the perceived legitimacy of the owners’ demands to the managers. Our results show that the higher the managers’ CMD, the less applicable are the recommendations of agency theory to incentivizing and controlling the managers.