In most corporations the salaries of executives are set by a group from the corporation' s board of directors  Since the board' s primary mission is to safeguard the economic health of the corporation rather than to make its executives rich, this way of setting executives' salaries is expected to prevent excessively large salaries  But, clearly, this expectation is based on poor reasoning
After all, most members of a corporation' s board are themselves executives of some corporation and can expect to benefit from setting generous benchmarks for executives' salaries
most corporate executives, thanks to their generous salaries, are not financially dependent on money earned as board members