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The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which chief executive officer (CEO) transactional and transformational leader behaviors as well as CEO self-enhancing versus self-transcendent values permeate through the organization to influence middle-level managers.

Using a multi-level longitudinal design, the authors collected self-reported value data from 32 CEOs and 119 top management team (TMT) members rated their CEOs on transactional and transformational leader behaviors at Time 1; 18 months later, TMTs rated the in-role behaviors and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) of 331 mid-level managers. Also, at Time 2, mid-level managers evaluated their relationship with the organization in terms of economic and social exchange. HLM was used to analyze the data.

The authors found the positive relationship between transactional CEO leader behaviors and mid-level manager in-role behaviors to be enhanced when CEOs hold self-transcendent values, whereas this relationship was weakened by CEO self-enhancing values. Similarly, the relationship between CEO transformational leader behaviors and mid-level manager OCBs was found to be strengthened when leaders espoused self-transcendent values. Finally, the authors found that economic exchange mediated the relationship between the transactional leadership * self-enhancing values interaction term and mid-level manager in-role behaviors. Similarly, social exchange mediated the relationship between the transformational leadership * self-transcendent values interaction term and mid-level manager OCBs.

Leadership/OB.

This study aimed to examine how senior leadership influences corporate communication and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Using two-way symmetrical communication model in public relations and leadership theory, it investigated the effects of CEOs' task- and relationship-oriented leadership on symmetrical internal communication, employees' organizational commitment and communicative behaviors.

An online survey was conducted with 417 full-time employees working in various industries in the United States.

The results showed that CEOs' relationship-oriented leadership significantly influenced symmetrical internal communication, which, in turn, increased affective commitment and employees' scouting behavior. CEOs' task-oriented communication had no significant effect on symmetrical communication.

This study advances theoretical understanding of two-way symmetrical communication in relation to senior leadership and provides practical insights for corporate leaders and public relations practitioners regarding how to improve employee outcomes through CEOs' strategic leadership and internal communication practices.

This paper examines the relationship between chief executive officers' (CEOs') leadership behaviors (consideration and initiating structure) and firm and individual performance (i.e. profitability, affective commitment and employees' willingness to change) in small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) that need to adapt to changing environments.

Survey data was collected from SMEs (28 firms, 235 employees) in the accounting industry along with objective performance register data (profit and return on assets). The predicted model was tested with multilevel structural equations modeling (MSEM) using a maximum likelihood estimator.

The CEO leadership behavior of initiating structure was positively related to firms' profitability, while the CEO leadership behavior of consideration was positively related to employees' willingness to change and affective commitment.

Small accounting firms typically offer standard services that are now being replaced by digital solutions. These firms have an incentive to offer new services, such as business advisory services. Therefore, leaders should embrace the duality of consideration and initiating structure to gain employees' willingness to change and optimize overall firm performance.

The paper contributes to leadership literature by examining a novel context (CEO consideration and initiation of structure in SMEs in uncertain environments) using a combination of firm performance measures (e.g. objective outcomes at the firm level and employees' willingness to change as a new measure at the individual level). In addition, it reports a comprehensive test of the full model using MSEM, the findings of which demonstrate the importance of dual leadership behaviors for CEOs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the effect of cultural and social acceptance on CEO leadership.

Several instruments were used to capture key concepts (i.e. Organisational Culture Profile, Marlowe‐Crowne Social Desirability Scale, Transformational Leadership Inventory, and Leader Reward and Punishment Questionnaire), which were examined using confirmatory factor analysis. Data were collected from 635 Australian CEOs.

The results of hierarchical multi‐regression analysis clarified the importance of self‐deception and impression management as influential context factors, and how both operate at the pinnacle of organisations. The study also identifies that transformational and transactional leadership behaviours were uniquely influenced by specific cultural dimensions, and suggests that CEOs use combinations of these behaviours to respond to four cultural dimensions (i.e. emphasis on rewards, performance orientation, innovation, and stability) in order to produce competitive advantages.

The study highlights how CEOs are still vulnerable to conforming to the social norms of their organisation and also how CEOs use a repertoire of leadership behaviours, in response to the importance of different cultural dimensions.

The paper contributes to the leadership literature by directly addressing how context impacts on CEO leadership in three specific areas: social acceptance needs, demographics and culture. Further, the study investigates CEO transformational and transactional leadership behaviours rather than global constructs, and directly addresses the common method variance issue.

Based on the team conflict theory and organizational learning theory, this study aims to discuss the two different types of conflicts of the top management team (TMT) on the different mechanisms of exploratory learning behavior of firms, and, based on the perspective of CEO-TMT (CEO – chief executive officer) interface, the different moderating effects caused by different CEO leadership styles are clarified.

Using the sample of 193 firms’ samples with multi-source data, the authors take an empirical test of the theoretical framework.

The effect of task conflict on exploratory learning behavior was insignificant, and relationship conflict had a positive effect on exploratory learning behavior. However, when CEO’s transformational leadership level was high, or transactional leadership level was low, there existed “bathtub curve” relationship between task conflict and exploratory learning behavior, and the relationship conflict under these conditions strengthened exploratory learning behavior. When CEO’s transactional leadership level was high, or transformational leadership level was low, there existed the inverted U-shaped relationship between task conflict and exploratory learning behavior, and the relationship conflict under such conditions weakened exploratory learning behavior.

First, the authors challenge the assumption of linear mechanism of task conflict, trying to build the mechanism of curve hypothesis, and the nonlinear explanation might be able to integrate the inconsistent results in the existing literature. Second, according to the inconsistent results of relationship conflict in existing literature, this study takes perspective of the CEO-TMT and introduces CEO leadership behavior as a moderating variable to test the moderating effect of CEO leadership and clarifies the boundary conditions of TMT conflicts.

From an internal perspective, the purpose of this study is to understand employees' responses to chief executive officer (CEO) activism, a phenomenon wherein a company's CEO expresses his/her own opinions and ideas on controversial sociopolitical issues. Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR), public relations and leadership literature, this study examines the effects of employees' expectations toward CEOs and transformational CEO leadership on the perceived morality of CEO activism and its attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.

An online survey was conducted with 417 full-time employees in the US whose CEO has been engaging in sociopolitical issues.

The results showed that employees' ethical expectations toward their CEOs and transformational CEO leadership were positively associated with perceived morality of CEO activism, whereas economic expectations toward CEOs had no significant relationship with it. In turn, perceived morality of CEO activism contributed to employees' positive attitudes and supportive behaviors for their CEOs and their companies.

This study is among the first attempts to examine the effectiveness of CEO activism from an internal perspective, drawing from CSR, public relations and leadership literature.

This study aims to examine the effect of chief executive officer (CEO) integrity on organizations’ strategic orientation. The authors propose that CEOs who have high degrees of integrity tend to negatively influence each of the three core dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) – innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking. They also argue that this impact of CEO integrity is likely to be stronger for overconfident CEOs and the CEOs with high power. Furthermore, this negative relationship is expected to attenuate when the firm has high customer orientation and when the CEO is compensated with high equity-pay ratio.

Seemingly unrelated regression analysis was conducted on panel of 741 firm-year observations of 213 firms across 2014–2017. CEO integrity and each of the three dimensions of EO were measured using content analysis of CEOs’ letters to shareholders. CEO power was measured using CEO stock ownership and CEO duality. CEO overconfidence was measured by using options-based measure. Customer orientation was measured by using content analyses on annual reports. CEO equity-pay based ratio was measured as sum of value of stock and option awards divided by CEO’s total compensation. This study considered alternative measures and performed treatments for potential endogeneity, sample selection bias and outliers.

The research findings conclude that organizations with CEOs who have high integrity tend to have lower levels of all sub-dimensions of EO – innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking. Further, the results indicate that the negative effect that CEO integrity has, affects one of its dimensions – proactiveness, such that the relation is strengthened when the CEO has high power and is highly overconfident. This negative effect weakens when the CEO is compensated with high equity-pay ratio. The results also indicate that the negative effect of integrity and innovativeness and risk-taking weakens when the firm has high customer orientation.

The research contributes to upper echelon theory literature by adding to the discussion of how business executives’ psychological traits map onto firm behavior. This research also finds common ground between literature on innovation and upper echelons, contributing to awareness about the drivers of firms’ EO.

This research addresses the question of firm relation to EO by highlighting that firms’ EO is also shaped by the psychological traits of their CEOs and the interaction of these traits with CEOs’ cognitive biases. Thus, board members of firms led by CEOs with high integrity can limit CEO’s risk-averse behavior by focusing on their training and by creating incentive systems. It is also advantageous for CEOs to understand that integrity is a double-edged sword, thus leveraging the strengths of their integrity, while simultaneously using tools such as training to diminish its negative aspects.

This paper fulfils a twofold identified need to: study the antecedents of each of the three dimensions of EO, not limited to corporate governance; and unearth the counterproductive behaviors associated with bright traits that make up their dark side

When corporations adopt a corporate social responsibility (CSR) program and use and name it in their external communications, their members should act in line with CSR. The purpose of this paper is to present an experiment in which the consistent or inconsistent behavior of a CEO was studied.

In this experiment the authors offered materials about an organization that has an extensive program on sustainability. In the consistent condition the authors presented a CEO who traded in his sports car for a hybrid car (which actually happened), whereas in the inconsistent condition the authors presented material in which the CEO kept his sports car.

The hypotheses were not supported. Inconsistent behavior did not lead to a significantly different attitude towards the company or lower purchase intentions.

The sample consisted of students who were maybe not familiar with the particular company, the CEO of the company and/or with the sustainability programs of the company. The materials developed in the experiment might be too weak.

Although the expected results were not found, the authors certainly think that consistent behavior of the CEO and other organizational members might decrease skeptical responses of stakeholders when they are confronted with CSR communication.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between CEO leadership behavior and the culture of the organization within the context of Indian organizations.

Two five-scale questionnaires were completed by senior executives (n=485) who have interaction with their CEO. The first instrument captured the executives’ perspective of their CEO’s leadership behavior along six dimensions (People Centric, Global Ambitions, Opportunity Sensing, Visionary, Exemplary, and Dependable). The second instrument captured the executives’ perspective of their organization’s culture along six dimensions (Results Focused, Talent Development, Employee Empowerment, Equity and Fairness, Open Communication, and Decentralization). These data were analyzed using factor analysis, correlation analysis, and least-squares regression.

A correlation analysis indicates that a significant relationship exists between several aspects of CEO leadership behavior and characteristics of the organizational culture. Regression analysis indicated that the overall CEO leadership behavior prominently explains (R²=0.397) the organization’s culture. Notably, two CEO dimensions, People Centricity and Global Ambition, were found to have an exceptionally high degree of association with the culture of the organization.

There is consistency between findings from western academic leader-culture research and the same in the Indian work setting.

Findings of this study can serve as a guidepost for the selection of leaders in an organization.

There is a scarcity of leader-organization research involving national culture features; the Indian context is fundamental to this study and is called for by the growing presence of India-born leadership in western organizations.

The purpose of this research is to examine how the chief exective officers (CEO's) transformational leadership impacts organizational innovation and individual innovative behavior, through the mediating role of collaborative human resource management (HRM) practices.

By using a stratified sampling technique, the data were obtained from ten Microfinance banks located in five metropolitan cities of Pakistan. By adopting a purposive sampling technique, total 427 responses were received out of which 411 responses were considered for data analysis. Structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was adopted using AMOS 21.0 to test the developed hypotheses.

The findings of the study described a significant and positive relationship between CEO transformational leadership and collaborative HRM. The collaborative HRM has also a positive impact on organizational innovation and individual innovative behavior. Moreover, the results revealed that collaborative HRM fully mediates between CEO transformational leadership and organizational innovation. However, partial mediate between CEO transformational leadership and individual innovative behavior.

The results of this study can be helpful for bank organizations and policymakers who have extended vision and anticipate the significance of innovation in a fast-changing market. The results of the study also provide the space and scope for prospective researchers and scholars for further research.

There is substantial literature existing on the relationship between CEO transformational leadership, organizational innovation and individual innovative behavior. However, the study finds this that only few researchers took the opportunity to observe the mediating role of collaborative HRM on the relationship between CEO transformational leadership, organizational innovation and individual innovative behavior in the context of Pakistan.