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In this paper the authors study how sociodemographic characteristics and personality traits of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) impact financial performance in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in an emerging economy such as Chile.

The authors applied a questionnaire to 185 Chilean SME CEOs during 2017 concerning sociodemographic characteristics (gender, age, experience and marital status), personality traits (extraversion, responsibility, openness to experience, agreeableness, and neuroticism) and firm characteristics.

The authors find that some sociodemographic characteristics (gender and age) significantly impact SME performance. The authors find no significant connection between personality traits and firm performance.

This paper contributes to the business literature by investigating how sociodemographic variables and personality traits of the CEO are related to SME financial performance; by providing new evidence on the relationship between CEO characteristics and firm performance, mostly centered on developed economies, in the context of an emerging economy; and allowing for a better understanding of how CEO decisions impact firm performance.

Este artículo estudia cómo las características sociodemográficas y los rasgos de personalidad del gerente general (CEO) afectan el desempeño financiero de Pequeñas y Medianas Empresas (PYMEs) en una economía emergente como Chile.

Se aplicó un cuestionario a 185 gerentes generales de PYMEs chilenas en 2017 acerca de sus características sociodemográficas (género, edad, experiencia, estado civil), rasgos de personalidad (extraversión, responsabilidad, apertura a la experiencia, amabilidad y neuroticismo) y características de la empresa.

Se encontró que ciertas características sociodemográficas (género, edad) afectan significativamente el desempeño de las PYMEs. No se encontraron asociaciones significativas entre rasgos de personalidad y desempeño de la empresa.

Este trabajo contribuye a la literatura de negocios al investigar cómo las variables sociodemográficas y los rasgos de personalidad del gerente general se relacionan con el desempeño financiero de las PYMEs; al entregar nueva evidencia sobre la relación entre características del gerente general y el desempeño de la empresa, mayoritariamente centrada en economías desarrolladas, en el contexto de una economía emergente; y al permitir una mejor comprensión de cómo las decisiones del gerente general afectan el desempeño de las empresas.

Can personality traits of chief executive officers (CEOs) be detected at a distance? Following newspaper speculation that the banking crisis of 2008 was partly caused by CEO hubris, this paper seeks to analyse the CEO letters to shareholders of a single bank over ten years for evidence of CEO personality traits, including narcissism (a contributor to hubris), hubris, overconfidence and CEO‐attribution. Following predictions that hubris increases the longer individuals occupy positions of power, the research aims to examine whether hubristic characteristics intensify over time.

This paper takes concepts of hubris from the clinical psychology literature and applies them to discourses in CEO letters to shareholders in annual reports. The research comprises a longitudinal study of the discretionary narrative disclosures in the CEO letters to shareholders in eight annual reports, benchmarked against disclosures in the CEO letters to shareholders of the previous and subsequent CEOs of the same organisation.

The results point to evidence of narcissism and hubris in the personality of the bank CEO. Over half the sentences analysed were found to contain narcissistic‐speak. In 45 per cent of narcissistic‐speak sentences, there were three of more symptoms of hubris – what Owen and Davison describe as extreme hubristic behaviour. In relation to CEO overconfidence, only seven sentences (2 per cent) contained bad news. More than half of the good news was attributed to the CEO and all the bad news was attributed externally. The research thus finds evidence of hubris in the CEO letters to shareholders, which became more pronounced the longer the CEO served.

The analysis of CEO discourse is highly subjective, and difficult to replicate.

The primary contribution of this research is the adaptation of the 14 clinical symptoms of hubris from clinical psychology to the analysis of narratives in CEO letters to shareholders in annual reports to reveal signs of CEO hubris.

This study aims to investigate the impact of chief executive officers' (CEO’s) core self-evaluation and grandiose narcissism on firm performance. This work combines bright and dark personality sides to explore how complex CEO's behavioral characteristics affect firms' outcomes. In addition, top management team (TMT) behavioral integration is considered as an organizational setting that acts as a conductive device bridging CEOs behavioral characteristics with firms' performance.

The data for this study are based on 187 respondents, including CEOs and TMTs, across medium and large firms in Turkey through an online survey using a questionnaire. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the data collected.

The study finds that only CEO-TMT narcissism and TMT behavioral integration have a positive direct effect on firm financial performance. Contrary to expectations, CEO-TMT core self-evaluation has a negative direct effect on firm performance. Moreover, the results show that environmental dynamism interacts positively and significantly with CEO-TMT narcissism. Thus, the claim that TMT behavioral integration has a mediating effect is not supported in the context of medium and large firms in Turkey.

This study contributes to the upper echelons theory (UET) literature by highlighting the boundary conditions under which narcissistic CEOs can interact with more behaviorally integrated TMT members to exchange information, make joint decisions and collaborate in a relatively dynamic environment, as well as aggregating the bright side and dark side of CEOs personality traits and examining their effects alongside those of TMT behavioral integration on the firm performance. Finally, this study enriches the upper echelons literature by providing evidence from Turkey.

Seeks to investigate the extent to which CEOs shape the process of making strategic decisions (SDs). Despite the significant research interest in this topic, knowledge is still incomplete.

Using evidence from a sample of 107 SDs, studied in Greece, the present paper explores the influence of CEO personality and demographic characteristics on the process of making SDs. A number of environmental and internal organisational variables are used as control variables measuring the broader context.

The results suggest that the broader context is on average more influential than the CEO. However, the CEO's demographic characteristics appear to influence several process characteristics (i.e. rationality, hierarchical decentralisation and politicisation). CEO personality characteristics do not appear to have any significant influence on the process.

This paper focuses on only a few personality and demographic characteristics. The use of a different set of CEO characteristics (e.g. functional specialisation, etc.) as well as the characteristics of the top management team is more than welcome. More empirical studies are needed to replicate and extend this study by examining variables not included here.

Conventional wisdom as well as recent empirical evidence holds that the management style of Greek companies tends to be rather centralised, and dominated by one powerful individual. The results contradict this belief. It seems that in order to survive and achieve long‐term viability, Greek companies were forced to introduce changes in their management style, including a more team‐based style of decision making. In such a context, personality characteristics of the CEO or any other single influential player may not decisively affect the SD process.

Few studies have examined empirically the influence of such a combination of factors on strategic decision processes.

This study examines the relationship between strategic entrepreneurial behaviors (SEBs) and the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in an emerging market context. The authors expand upon prior work in this area by building and testing a model that assesses the moderating effect of CEOs’ narcissism and Machiavellianism on the relationship between SEBs and SME performance.

To test the authors’ theoretical model, the authors use the results of a larger data collection project in Russia to create a national random sample of 372 Russian SMEs that were approached between August and November 2019.

The authors found support for the positive relationship between SEBs and SME performance. Additionally, the authors found that CEO narcissism and Machiavellianism strengthen the relationship between SEBs and firm performance.

This study is an important step toward enriching the understanding of the role of CEO personality traits in shaping the efficiency of entrepreneurial behavior at the firm level. Extending previous research, the authors show that SEBs have a positive effect on firm performance in an emerging market context. Additionally, the authors contribute insight about how personality characteristics of CEOs, specifically narcissism and Machiavellianism, influence the relationship between entrepreneurial behavior and firm performance. Finally, the authors’ research contributes to the development of strategic leadership theory: the results offer insight to scholars regarding the potentially beneficial attributes of otherwise “dark” leaders.

Merger waves have typically been viewed through the prism of either corporate strategy or macro-economics. This paper aims to broaden debate about factors that cause – or are associated with – mergers/merger waves over a 120-year period. It ascribes “personalities” to six distinct waves and draws an overarching conclusion about how merger architects are viewed.

Databases and interviews are used to piece together detail about CEOs associated with six distinct and recognized merger-waves during a 120-year focal period. The study establishes and defends, a priori, principles for interrogating data to get a sense of each wave-era’s corporate personality/idiosyncrasy. For each era, two exemplar CEO-profiles are presented and – through inductive-reasoning – held out as representative.

Distinct personalities are associated with six merger waves. Each wave is given a summary anthropomorphic description which conveys a sense that it may be viewed as the non-rationale expression of aggregate and historically distinct CEO behavior within a circumscribed timeframe.

The work’s key limitation – explicitly acknowledged – is that it amassed data/evidence from disparate historical sources. However, the authors have developed and defended principles for addressing this concern.

Improved investment analyses, in particular. The work prefigures formal establishment of a new variable-set impacting share-price prediction.

The paper offers a perspective on how psychological/personality-related variables impact management decision-making, creating something of a bridge between mostly non-overlapping research disciplines.

The paper broadens debate about how and why merger waves occur. It removes the exclusive analysis of merger waves from the hands of economic historians and strategic management theorists.

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

This study aims to investigate the relationship between Chief Executive Officer (CEO) narcissism and firm performance. Further, it examined the moderation effects of CEO duality and top management team (TMT) and board member agreeableness on the CEO narcissism–firm performance relationship.

The study is based on survey data from 373 CEOs in the automobile industry in India. The paper used mixed method research where CEO narcissism and TMT agreeableness has been measured using survey instruments, other data such as firm performance has been captured using secondary sources.

The study confirms that the relationship between CEO narcissism and firm performance is curvilinear, meaning that narcissism can positively impact firm performance to a point, but may become counter-productive or ineffective beyond that. Further, CEO duality and TMT and board member agreeableness significantly impact this relationship.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how CEO behavior can affect variance in firm performance. The authors discuss theoretical and practical implications and offer suggestions for future research.

This paper aims to open up dialogue between several popular non-fiction books written on Lehman Brothers – and its chief executive officer (CEO) Dick Fuld in particular – and the academic literature on leadership and organizational culture.

Vicky Ward’s book The Devil’s Casino is examined closely to understand the influence of the bank’s CEO on the organizational culture.

A notable instance of coupling is highly recurrent in the book, linking the personality of Dick Fuld with his top management team and Lehman Brothers’ employees.

Focusing on the CEO’s personality, this article engages with the academic literature allowing for a distinct problematization of the issue, and a potential resolution: the importance of changes in leadership to trigger an evolution in Wall Street’s culture.

This study aims to explore the moderating impact of narcissism overload on the relation between founder CEO and entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in registered private schools of Pakistan.

Data were collected through a stratified random sampling method with the help of previously validated questionnaires. A sample of 121 replies was gathered for analysis. SPSS has been used to find the results.

Results depict that CEO narcissism moderates the relation between founder CEO and EO and does not moderate the relationship between and CEO ownership and EO.

Many studies focused on the founder personality characteristics (such as generalized self-efficacy or locus of control) are not directly observed, but rather inferred their effect indirectly. The study contributes to examine how the founder CEO variable interacts with CEO personality to influence EO. This study will propose a practical approach to investigate whether and how the narcissism constructs moderate the founder CEO–EO relationship. Direct association between stock ownership and EO will also be examined.