The continuing search for the Holy Grail

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to enrich the finding by Aguinis et al. (2018) that there is little overlap between the extremes of firm performance and the extremes of CEO pay using a novel approach to characterize the distribution of pay and performance. The authors aim to shift the focus of compensation researchers from fruitlessly trying to link pay to performance to theory-rich accounts of pay that take into consideration the idiosyncratically motivated and socially embedded nature of CEO compensation. Design/methodology/approach The authors’ approach in this commentary is conceptual. They synthesize compensation literature from different fields such as economics, finance, sociology, strategic management and corporate law, as well as the empirical findings from the focal paper to support their characterization of the current state of the literature and future directions it should take. Findings The authors synthesize discussion of CEO pay down to three dimensions of CEO responsibilities and motivations. They argue that a realistic pay design should take into account that CEOs have limited control over performance, they are accountable to multiple stakeholders and they are motivated by financial as well as nonfinancial incentives. Originality/value The commentary presents researchers with high-order framing of CEO pay that goes beyond debating over methodology or narrowly focusing on limited behavioral drivers of pay setting. Instead, the authors encourage researchers to take advantage of their three-legged framework to theorize about CEO pay.