Search results

This conceptual paper examines the notion of CEO brands and the problems that arise if they are misaligned with company brands. Previous research examines product, company and people brands and implications for senior executives and organizations, but there is no theoretical framework for CEO brand stewardship. This research aims to fill the gap.

The marketing literature is examined to identify differences between products and people as brands, and the potential for CEO brands to enhance corporate brand equity. Based on an application of existing branding concepts to CEOs, a conceptual model of CEO brands is developed to include an analysis of the relationships between its constituent parts.

CEO brands can be legitimately considered as brands, and existing brand conceptualisations can be applied to CEOs as long as some particularities are accounted for. CEO brands are influenced by their personality and their role as managers, and organisations need to constantly monitor CEO brand reputation as well as communicate its positioning. A successful CEO branding enhances perceived brand value and creates value for organisations.

This research informs brand managers and strategists about brand equity creation. Monitoring stakeholder perceptions of CEOs can enhance rather than detract from corporate brand value. As it showed that people and CEOs can be legitimately considered as brands, the concept of branding needs to be extended to embrace people and CEO brands.

For business practice, this research informs about the differences and similarities between traditional product brands and CEO brands. Particularly it informs that organisations should consider that the CEO brand personifies to stakeholders what the organisation stands for, for example, when hiring a new CEO.

This research provides a new conceptual model on the previously under‐researched area of CEO branding. The insights into CEO brands provide the basis for empirical research into relationships between brand identity, reputation, position and equity, with implications for personal fame and company fortune.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) hometown identity on company audit fees in the Chinese setting.

This study uses data from Chinese public companies in the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange for the period 2008–2019. This study investigates the impact path of CEO hometown identity on company audit fees and further examines the moderating role of internal and external governance level.

This study finds that CEO hometown identity is significantly and negatively related to company audit fees. In addition, CEO hometown identity can reduce audit fees by alleviating agency risk and litigation risk. Moreover, the negative effect of CEO hometown identity on audit fees is more pronounced in companies with a higher percentage of institutional investors shareholding and more analysts tracking quantity.

This study may provide new references for executives’ selection, auditors’ optimization decisions and regulators’ information disclosure system.

This study contributes to the literature by exploring the effect of CEO hometown identity on audit fees in the context of China.

Stories to live by, a narrative conception of identity, are multiple and diverse. As such, I argue that a narrative approach to research allows for complex understanding(s) of people’s lives and provokes meaning-making for participants and researchers. In this chapter, I think with the stories of Mr CEO, a research participant, to understand better the ways that his competing stories to live by are held in tension through his life experience. Mr CEO identified as African American, male, and gay, for lack of a better term. Moreover, Mr CEO’s experience growing up in a conservative African American Christian church shaped his identity-making and added complexity to his sense-making around his multiple stories to live by. I inquire into the ways Mr CEO restoried his stories to live by as they conflicted in his life experience. Mr CEO’s process of seeking narrative coherence among his many stories to live by allowed him to make sense of these dissonant stories. Similarly, it was difficult for Mr CEO to fit in with many of the familiar communities related to his dissonant stories of identity (church, gay, African American communities). As a result of his shifting stories, it became necessary for him to find new contexts and relationships that allowed for multiple and diverse plotlines. Mr CEO engaged in the process of community making as he sought to find relationships that acknowledged and valued his racial, religious, and sexual identity.

This study aims to examine the unique nature of family firms by investigating the moderating effect of chief executive officer (CEO) identity on CEO career horizon and the auditor’s client risk assessment. Consistent with literature on family businesses, the level of CEO attachment to socio-emotional wealth (SEW) varies among family businesses.

This study used a longitudinal sample of 2,063 non-financial family firm-year observations from 2005 to 2016 listed on the Bursa Malaysia. The study used the general method of moments (GMM), which controls for endogeneity concerns.

The results reveal that, without the moderating effect of CEO identity, the relationship between CEO career horizon and auditor’s risk assessment is positive, which suggests that the auditor’s risk perception of retiring CEOs is very high. However, the interaction of CEO identity reverses the relationship as evidenced by the negative and significant coefficient on the interacted terms. The finding suggests that the auditor’s perceived risk associated with CEO career horizon is lower in family firms with CEOs affiliated to family members or in which the CEO has an equity stake. Overall, the findings provide compelling evidence that the extent of the CEO’s attachment to the firm’s SEW affects the auditor’s client risk assessment.

The findings of the study serve as an enlightenment to policymakers such as Bursa Malaysia and Security Commission that within the family-controlled firms, differences still exist; therefore, there might be a need for future regulatory initiative to cater for the specific need of family-controlled firms.

The study contributes to prior literature by departing from the agency theory adopted in previous studies on auditor choice in family firms under the assumption that family firms are homogenous.

The purpose of this study is to add to the existing research on critical perspectives on diversity management (DM). Specifically, this study examines the narratives of women chief executive officers (CEOs) from different countries of origin to understand how they enact the DM discourse by drawing on their past and present experiences at US multinational corporations (MNCs) located in Mexico.

This study, based on six open-ended interviews with local and expatriate women CEOs who work in MNCs situated in Mexico, used a sensemaking approach to analyze their narratives. The theoretical foundation of the study is based on decolonial feminist theory, which is used to analyze the hierarchical binary between Anglo-Saxon/European woman and the Mexican/Latin American woman with respect to the discourse of DM.

This study found that the dominant discourse used by women CEOs, expats and nationals was a business case for diversity. Female CEOs represent MNCs in favorable terms, compared to those of local companies, despite the nuances in the antagonistic representations in their narratives. This study also found that the women CEOs’ narratives perpetuated a discourse of “otherness” that created a hierarchy between Anglo-Saxons (US/MNCs’ culture) and Latin Americans (Mexican/local companies’ culture).

This study contributes to critical studies on DM by analyzing diverse forms of power involving gender, race/ethnicity and organizational hierarchy. The use of decolonial feminist theory to examine MNCs is a novel approach to understanding women’s identities and the power differences between local/foreign contexts and global/local businesses. This study also discusses the implications of its findings for women in business careers and concludes with a call for more research within the global South (Latin America).

Building on the intergroup relations perspective on the social identity theory, the authors examine whether firms' environmental, social and governance (ESG) varies when local firms have non-local CEOs. Additionally, the authors examine which contextual factors may strengthen or weaken the effectiveness of ESG in helping non-local CEOs garner trust, legitimacy and resources support from local stakeholders.

Pooled OLS regressions, based on unbalanced panel data and controlling for year and industry fixed effects, were estimated using a sample composed of 836 Chinese A-share listed firms that have Bloomberg ESG disclosure scores data from 2006 to 2019.

Results suggest that companies with non-local CEOs, who are perceived as outgroup members by the local stakeholders, would lead to a higher level of ESG performance to overcome the intergroup bias they face. In addition, results also show that companies with a lower level of previous ESG decoupling and having more slack will mitigate the relationship between non-local CEOs and ESG performance. Conversely, firm visibility at a high level will promote the positive relationship between non-local CEOs and ESG performance.

This study offers theoretical insights that extend the focus of intragroup relation to outgroup identity, by introducing an intergroup relations lens to explore how outgroup (or nonprototypical) leaders utilize ESG to counter intergroup bias they suffer. Moreover, this study also extends current literature focusing on non-local CEOs and ESG performance.

The management of multiple organizational identities is an important issue in contemporary organizations. However, relatively few researchers have examined how organizations and their leaders control or cope with this ambiguity. This paper contributes with an empirical description of a Chief Executive Officer’s (CEO’s) efforts to handle multiple identities. It is based on a case study of a corporate consulting unit with dual organizational identities – a staff identity and an external consultant identity. The paper shows that the CEO’s rhetoric focuses on creating an identity hierarchy, highlighting the identity of external consultant. The distinctiveness of this identity, in comparison to the parent organization, is emphasized by using the IT consulting industry as a prototype for the self‐categorization of Telco Consulting. In combination with the secondary staff identity, a loosely coupled relation to the parent organization is constructed. One conclusion that may be drawn from the study is that the two identities emerge in part through the effects of internal contrasting.

Absorptive capacity (AC), the ability to leverage external knowledge for innovation, helps explain the mixed findings on family firms' (FFs) innovation performance. Our research focuses on the chief executive officer (CEO)’s role – whether family or non-family and founding or later generation – in influencing AC. We also explore how firm size and environmental dynamism affect these relationships, offering insights into varying AC levels among FFs.

Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models were estimated to test the hypotheses using a sample of 364 FFs in Spain.

FFs’ AC is greater when the CEO is a family member, and even more so when the family CEO belongs to the founding family generation. While AC diminishes in larger FFs, this effect is mitigated when the CEO is a family member. The predicted moderating effect of environmental dynamics is not supported by the analyses.

This paper adds insights about the drivers of heterogeneity in innovation among FFs, addressing recent calls for more nuanced views of how family members drive the strategic behavior of the business and incorporating considerations of different types of FFs based on the identity of the firm CEO. The results overall support the theoretical claims and also open up important questions for future studies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine autobiographical vignettes that are embedded in the annual report letters to shareholders of chief executive officers (CEOs). The aim is to reveal the capacity of this narrative to self-construct leader identity, show how they can help CEOs attain legitimacy and how they help CEOs to exert management control.

The paper is positioned within literature that focuses on the importance of the annual report CEO letter and the strategic use of CEO autobiographical vignettes therein. Three autobiographical vignettes included in letters to shareholders signed by E. Hunter Harrison, CEO of Canadian National Railway (2004, 2005 and 2007), are analysed using close reading techniques. This involved the authors separately reading each vignette by slowing down the reading process to aid understanding of the text’s “inner workings”. Several close readings of each vignette were conducted until a consensus was reached between the authors.

Autobiographical vignettes have strong potential to be used strategically, as rhetorical devices, to help CEOs exert management control, facilitate change, shape leader-follower relationships and sustain self-legitimacy.

This paper is the first within the accounting domain to highlight the potential for autobiographical narrative in a CEO’s annual letter to shareholders to convey corporate information (including strategic intent), to construct leader identity and to exert management control.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the “black box” of top management team (TMT) processes such as communication and power distribution, examining the example of ethnically diverse TMTs in Latvia.

The study relies on case studies of two multinational companies operating in Latvia.

The findings suggest that ethnic diversity in TMTs leads to more informal and open communication in the teams, but has no clear influence on power distribution in the teams. The results highlight the importance of studying variables that could moderate the effects of ethnic diversity on communication and power distribution; throughout the study, these variables were identified as, but not limited to, environment and shared goals.

This paper uses case studies to explore the black box of team processes, and proposes an alternative operationalization of cultural diversity, measured as ethnic diversity. It also advocates an alternative conceptualization of TMTs expressed in terms of decision‐making power. The paper's major contribution is its opening up and exploration of team processes, usually avoided by researchers because of their assumed complexity. Moreover, the study contributes to TMT studies by presenting the Latvian environment as a unique research locus where ethnic identities are rich and various.