Search results

Building on the premise that the CEO position is complex and challenging, and drawing on research on upper echelons, executive job demands and emotions, this study explores how chief executive officers' (CEOs’) perceptions of job-associated difficulty can influence negative emotional displays and subsequently hamper firm innovation. Additionally, the authors explore how CEOs with higher levels of emotional intelligence might mitigate the influence of job demands on negative emotional displays.

The authors conducted a two-stage survey with a sample of CEOs and top management team members from 120 small- and medium-sized firms operating in multiple industries in Colombia.

The authors found that CEOs' perceptions of job demands are positively associated with CEOs' displays of negative emotions, which in turn are negatively associated with firm innovation. The authors also find that two dimensions of emotional intelligence (self-appraisal and regulation) weaken the influence of CEO perceptions of job demands on CEO negative emotional displays.

The authors advance a novel perspective on the challenges of leading organizations by explaining the emotional implications of the CEO position, underscoring their repercussions for important organizational outcomes such as innovation and suggesting potential ways CEOs can handle the emotional consequences of their position.

The quality of strategic decisions made at the helm of corporations matters a great deal. Predominantly, research on strategic decision-making has focused on CEOs as if they decide alone. Yet in reality, even the most powerful CEO makes strategic decisions together with an executive board. This chapter offers a theoretical explanation of strategic board decision-making through the emotional contagion between the CEO and board members.

We used both previous research and qualitative material – two case studies and interviews with several dozen CEOs of large corporations as well as the board members of one of them – to build our theoretical model.

Our inBoard Emotional Contagion Model (inBECM) specifies the following individual–collective emotional dynamics: After a strategic affective event has triggered an affective discussion within the boardroom, the emotionally intelligent CEO communicates verbally in order to – through an emotional contagion – homogenize board members’ emotional states leading to shared sense-making of the event and – potentially – to improved decision-making.

Suggestions are made for the inBECM contribution to emotion theory. Implications are stated for the key role of emotion in improving board decision-making and strategizing.

This study aims to analyze the ways in which chief executive officers (CEOs) communicate via Twitter and help develop guidelines for effective tweeting strategies that can leverage Twitter in leadership communication.

The authors conduct a large-scale content analysis of more than 65,000 tweets by 338 CEOs.

The authors propose a model that categorizes differences in CEO tweets along six independent dimensions: content professionalism, language professionalism, emotional valence, emotion activation, interactional efforts and information cues. The authors also develop coding schemes and measurement scales for each dimension.

This study provides a multi-dimensional paradigm as well as useful tools for future research on corporate leadership communication on social media.

While multinational companies develop meta-level policies to address grand sustainability challenges and CEOs are increasingly showing their social activism, the hard work of concretely defending communities’ rights and the environment from business exploitation is often left to powerless individuals, known as human rights defenders (here defenders), who face severe risks for their advocacy. According to some statistics, between 2015 and 2022, defenders worldwide have been subject to over 4,000 attacks, including killings, tortures, and intimidation. In this chapter, the authors discuss the relevance of defenders to the promotion of the sustainable development goal (SDG) agenda and develop a conceptual model to predict CEOs’ reactions to defenders.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Malaysian CEO Statements employ language and image to convey interaction between the CEO and stakeholders.

The paper examines an archive of 32 Malaysian CEO Statements. The archive is analyzed with Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA), where several interpersonal systems can establish how language and image features articulate interaction. The analysis identifies who the stakeholders are, and how these stakeholders and the CEO interact.

There are four stakeholders, who are the community, customer, employee and environment, and these stakeholders are sub-categorized by type or activity. The stakeholders and the CEO share multisemiotic interaction through contact, reaction and equality. These three strategies mimic a face-to-face conversation (contact) and the CEO is depicted to reveal some positive emotions (reaction) to social equals (equality). These strategies reflect synthetic personalization, through which the CEO and stakeholders seem to interact because the CEO speaks directly to stakeholders in friendly conversation about CSR. CEO Statements are part of the quest for social legitimacy and designate corporations as agents of positive social change. Their ideology can be stated as a general principle: corporation A recognizes problem B and proposes solution C, which has positive result D for stakeholder E.

Previous research has not emphasized interaction in CEO Statements. The paper also utilized SF-MDA, which may enhance the discursive competence or a systematic way to decipher language and image for people who practice or teach corporate communication.

This paper aims to call attention to the relative neglect in strategic decision‐making research to include a sense dimension, proposing a broadened conceptualization of strategic decision making that accounts for the processes through which managers generate sense when exposed to turbulence in their environments.

Based on scholarly writing and empirical‐oriented examples, the paper illustrates how managers cope with unusual and unexpected situations, and discusses fruitful directions for future research.

When faced with turbulence, managers generate and communicate sense through believing in and arguing for a certain course of action, and through meeting talk and interaction that entwine with emotions. The focus on both retrospective and prospective orientation of action unfolds a sense dimension integral to which are belief and emotion.

Important questions for future research concern the role “plausibility” plays in strategic action, the relationship between retrospective and prospective orientation of action, and the information conveyed by emotions.

The paper could contribute to an increased awareness among practitioners that they can act effectively when coping with turbulence simply by making plausible sense, and encourage reconciliation between calculative rationality and emotion, in practice promoting their complementarity.

The paper affords a broadened conceptualization of strategic decision making through interrelating scholarly writing on strategic decision making, sense‐making and emotion. It also draws inspiration from Polanyi's work on tacit dimension and knowing, furthering an understanding of how retrospective and prospective orientation unfold in connection with a tacit relation, constituting a so‐called sense‐made reality.

Drawing upon upper echelon, regulatory focus and attention theories and focusing on SMEs, the purpose of this paper is to answer questions on how the motivational disposition (promotion vs. prevention regulatory focus) of CEOs affects their information search patterns (i.e. search selection and intensity) and consequently organizational level engagement in different types of innovation activities (exploration vs. exploitation).

A quantitative study was conducted collecting data from the CEOs of SMEs operating in the dynamic wine and spirits industry in Greece. The data were collected in two independent time streams and the proposed theoretical model was tested by applying OLS regression analysis.

The current research provides evidence that differences in CEOs’ level of promotion and prevention focus trigger different information search selection and search intensity patterns. Nonetheless, the attention to innovation components act as mediators only in the hypothesized relationships between a CEO's level of prevention and promotion focus and exploration. Paradoxically, filtered through attention to innovation and triggered from the same motive, that is to reduce negative emotions, promotion focus CEOs choose to direct resources to exploitation and avoid investing in exploration, whilst the opposite was supported for prevention focus CEOs.

The results highlight the important role of a CEO's regulatory focus orientation in promoting diverse attention to innovation patterns and firm-level innovation tendencies towards exploration and/or exploitation.

This study's contributions extend and combine the theories of regulatory focus, UET and attention in the field of managerial/entrepreneurship behavior and innovation. Therefore, they are valuable for understanding the determinants of firm-level innovation choices (exploration vs. exploitation) in SMEs.

The purpose of this case study is to examine a new entrepreneurial business in Kiev, Ukraine. The focus is the difference between employees' espoused values and their deep beliefs, which leads to conflict among and within employees.

A theory is proposed about the interaction of espoused values, theory‐in‐use and cultural beliefs. Observation and interviews with staff demonstrated that there was great effort to live out the new espoused values, and also that cultural beliefs hindered this effort.

The proposed theory was supported. The role of the leader in modeling the espoused values was seen to be important for the employees' ability to live up to the new espoused values, and deserves further research.

Limitations include: replication of the study is needed before findings can safely be generalized. The capital city effect means the findings may apply to organizations in Kiev and not other Ukrainian cities.

The implication of the study is that employees' theories‐in‐use may undermine change, even when employees affirm the change, and the modeling of the leader might be essential in order for employees to change their theories‐in‐use. This may apply in organizations beyond Ukraine.

Understanding the impact of theory‐in‐use shaped by Ukrainian culture might be valuable for non‐Ukrainians doing business in Ukraine.

This paper aims to examine whether chief executive officer’s (CEO) information technology (IT) background can affect enterprises’ continuous green innovation (CGI).

This study uses the data of China’s listed enterprises from 2011 to 2019.

The statistical results reveal that when a company hires a CEO with an IT background, its CGI can be higher. Firm ownership, firm digitization and industry bias alter the impact of CEO’s IT background on firms’ CGI. This effect is most pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs), high-digitalized enterprises and skill-biased industries, while not in SOEs, low-digitalized enterprises and labor-biased industries.

This study has practical implications, as it measures CGI of enterprises. It also points to the necessity for a CEO’s IT background to enhance CGI.

The findings provide new strategies for incentivizing sustainable development and green innovation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to discuss the association between CEO’s IT background and enterprises’ CGI. The conclusions enrich both upper echelons theory and enterprise green innovation literature.

Little is known about what emotionally un(intelligent) CEOs really say to their close collaborators within the boardroom. Would the rhetoric content differ between an emotionally intelligent and an emotionally unintelligent CEO, especially during a crisis? This chapter aims to answer this question.

40 CEOs of large corporations were asked to deliver a verbal address to their board members in reaction to a vignette describing a critical situation for the company. Participants were provided with the Schutte self-report emotional intelligence (EI) test. The verbal content of CEOs' closed-door discourses was analyzed using Cognitive-Discursive Analysis (CDA) and, subsequently, Geometric Data Analysis (GDA).

The results revealed that CEOs with low EI tend to evoke unpleasant emotions, talk about competition, and often blame some – or all – of the board members for their (poor) actions in comparison to CEOs with high or medium EI. In contrast, CEOs with high EI tend to use terms in relation to decision or realization and appear to be more cooperative than those with lower EI and were also ready to make decisions on behalf of team.

Previous research has mainly focused on CEOs' public speeches. But the content of CEOs' speeches within the boardroom might noticeably differ from what they would say in a public address. The results of our exploratory study can serve CEOs as a basis toward improving their closed-door rhetoric during a crisis.

It would be interesting to enlarge the size of our population in order to strengthen our statistical analyses as well as explore other cultural and linguistic environments and other channels through which emotions can be expressed (e.g., human face, gesture, vocal tone).