EXECUTIVE INCENTIVES AND CORPORATE PERFORMANCE: A STRUCTURED NARRATIVE REVIEW

Abstract

This exploratory investigation adopts a structured narrative review of peer reviewed journal articles published between 2019 and 2025 to map research trajectories and provide an integrated synthesis of executive incentive arrangements in relation to corporate performance. Positioned at the interface of corporate finance and corporate governance, the study applies a systematic narrative approach to examining executive incentives. The review follows a clearly articulated protocol governing search procedures, screening stages, quality appraisal, and coding processes, with explicit specification of constructs, outcome variables, and inclusion criteria. The structured search of the Scopus database yielded thirty-nine relevant studies. Subsequent examination of these contributions organised the evidence into five dominant thematic categories, namely salary, equity-based incentives, perks, pay gaps and managerial power, while aggregating reported effects across market based, accounting based, and real performance measures. The findings reveal a limited emphasis on interactions across incentive modes and on institutional complementarities, despite their importance for incentive effectiveness. The resulting recommendations emphasise the need for sharper construct delineation, more rigorous research designs supported by credible identification strategies, and wider empirical coverage to enable meaningful cross context comparison, alongside integrative synthesis that explicitly links incentive mechanisms to observable outcomes. Overall, the article extends the literature on executive incentives within corporate finance and governance, with implications for both academic research and policy formulation.