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Prior work has suggested that individual decision-making is influenced by the emotions and cognition of the decision-maker. Within the firm context, the chief executive officer (CEO) is required to make many decisions that will meaningfully impact the firm. However, little is known about how CEO emotions and cognition influence not only firm decision-making but also the performance consequences of those decisions. Within this chapter, the authors conceptually explore (1) how CEO affect intensity moderates the relationship between performance below aspirations and risk-taking; and (2) how CEO cognitive complexity determines the directional effect of the risk-performance relationship.

A growing body of literature suggests that unpredictable, resource-depleting shocks – ranging from natural disasters to public health crises and beyond – require the firm to respond adaptively. However, how firms do so remains largely undertheorized. To contribute to this line of literature, the authors borrow from the conservation of resources (COR) theory of stress and the dynamic capabilities perspective to introduce the concept of firm stress – a state of reduced and irregular readiness firms enter into following unpredictable, resource-depleting shocks. Our theoretical model illustrates that firms must punctuate the stress state to adapt by first deploying a retrenchment response, thereby conserving resources and allowing the firm to consider how to best redeploy its dynamic capabilities to adapt. Subsequently, the firm can redeploy its capabilities and adaptively respond in one of three ways: exiting (reconfiguring resources for alternative use), persevering (reconfiguring resources for better use), or innovating (developing new resources). Overall, the authors offer a process model of firm stress and adaptive responses following an unpredictable, resource-depleting shock that paves the way for future research on stress in the strategy literature.

Work–nonwork policies and practices provide support for employee well-being, as well as a competitive advantage that can help differentiate organizations. However, not all work–nonwork policies and practices are effective, utilized, or relevant. In this chapter, the authors introduce “organizational boundary management strategy” as a way to leverage these policies and practices, making them more widely adopted and more effective. Organizational boundary management strategy refers to how an organization as a whole tends to support workers’ work–nonwork boundaries (i.e., via segmentation, integration, or somewhere in between). Although boundary management has historically tended to focus on how individuals navigate distinctions between work and personal life, the authors extend boundary management to the organization to suggest how understanding and aligning the organization’s overall boundary management strategies can support worker well-being. To expound on this, the authors present a model suggesting how organizational boundary management can be used to support worker well-being.

In 2023, the Leadership Pulse project will have been running for two decades. Since the inception of the program, we have engaged thousands of leaders around the world to quickly learn from them via short pulse surveys conducted multiple times per year. This chapter is the first overall discussion of what we learned during the last 20 years about leader energy, energy flow, predictors of energy, and outcomes of energy, which have been focused on individual and firm-level performance. Over the years, we learned that leaders are not immune to personal energy challenges; in fact, we find that their energy is continually tested by extreme demands within and outside their organizations. Also, we learned that there are solutions for helping leaders manage their energy better, and these do not have to be expensive, outsourced programs. In this chapter, we review key findings from the data and hope to help leaders continue learning to help themselves, their employees, customers, and the organizations they work in overall. I also will review three different interventions that we found to help leaders and employees work and stay at their best and enhance overall organizational goals and outcomes.

Strategic decisions leaders make involving organizational changes such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A), divestitures, and downsizing, which can influence and/or interact with other organizational factors. For example, within the context of M&A, changes impact financial performance, firm behaviors, and organizational culture. In addition, strategic decisions for these types of change can also interrelate with other more intrapersonal factors, including both leaders’ and employees’ health and well-being. Employee stress, also referred to as “merger syndrome,” outlines individual negative impacts of the changes including, but not limited to, cynicism and distrust, change wariness, and burnout, all accumulating to psychological effects including increases in detachment to work, stress, and sick leave. In this chapter, the authors outline the different impacts M&A phases have on stress and well-being and how they interrelate with the strategic decisions leaders make. The authors also outline future research opportunities and practical implications for how leaders and employees could better manage future major changes such as M&A activities.

In this chapter, the authors explore the notion of loneliness in the CEO role. Traditionally, leaders are portrayed as possessing plentiful personal and social resources whereas lonely people are portrayed as socially and personally lacking, and so the notion of being lonely in a leadership position seems counterintuitive. The authors explore the elements of the CEO role and discuss the various ways the position can induce or perpetuate loneliness. The authors review the research on loneliness in relation to the CEO role and lay the foundation for future research in this underdeveloped area. The authors propose that loneliness is likely to develop when CEOs either are new to the leadership role or enact negative individual behaviors and might be felt more acutely during times of poor performance, criticism, and difficult decisions. The authors discuss implications and suggestions for future research.

Sentiment analysis is a text analysis method that is developed for systematically detecting, identifying, or extracting the emotional intent of words to infer if the text expresses a positive or negative tone. Although this novel method has opened an exciting new avenue for organizational research – mainly due to the abundantly available text data in organizations and the well-developed sentiment analysis techniques, it has also posed a serious challenge to many organizational researchers. This chapter aims to introduce the sentiment analysis method in the text mining area to the organizational research community. In this chapter, the authors first briefly discuss the central role of sentiment in organizational research and then introduce the traditional and modern approaches to sentiment analysis. The authors further delineate research paradigms for text analysis research, advocating the iterative research paradigm (cf., inductive and deductive research paradigms) that is more suitable for text mining research, and also introduce the analytical procedures for sentiment analysis with three stages – discovery, measurement, and inference. More importantly, the authors highlight both the dictionary-based and machine learning (ML) approaches in the measurement stage, with special coverage on deep learning and word embedding techniques as the latest breakthroughs in sentiment and text analyses. Lastly, the authors provide two illustrative examples to demonstrate the applications of sentiment analysis in organizational research. It is the authors’ hope that this chapter – by providing these practical guidelines – will help facilitate more applications of this novel method in organizational research in the future.