The relationship between human capital and directors’ remuneration of Malaysian public listed companies

Abstract

A lot of previous study on directors’ remuneration unable to find conclusive evidence of what are the determinants of directors’ remuneration. Beside, many studies also fail to documented evidence on the relationship between directors’ remuneration with corporate performance. Due to this, this study tries to examine the determinants of directors’ remuneration from the human capital perspectives. Age, tenure and qualification were selected to test whether these factors contribute to the level of remuneration paid to the directors. Based on Malaysian listed companies, an ordinary least square regression analysis was employed to determine the predicted relationship. It was found that only age and tenure have significant positive relationship with total remuneration. This implicates that human capital elements do contribute to the amount of remuneration paid to the top executive of the company. This outcome also implies that the company may pay their directors based on the individual characteristics and background which possibly the reason of the existence of pay-for-performance non-relationship.