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Research on the organizational ramifications of chief executive officer (CEO) greed remains scarce. This study intends to fill this gap by examining the impact of CEO greed on an important yet risky corporate strategy, corporate tax avoidance (CTA). Drawing on upper echelons theory, the authors argue that greedier CEOs tend to engage in more CTA. The relationship is weaker when CEOs experienced economic recessions in their early career and stronger when CEOs are endowed with equity ownership of their respective firms.

The authors test the hypotheses with data from US public firms from 1997 to 2008 and employ the ordinary least square regression analysis to analyze the hypothesized relationships. The authors also test the robustness of the results by performing the two-stage least square regression and propensity score matching analyses.

The findings lend broad support to all the hypotheses. The authors find that greedier CEOs tend to engage in more CTA by paying lower corporate taxes. The impact of greed on CTA is attenuated when CEOs are recession CEOs and is exacerbated when CEOs own large numbers of firm shares.

This paper contributes to the upper echelons research by investigating a novel executive personal characteristic, greed, and its negative impact on an important organizational outcome. This paper also contributes to the growing tax research that recognizes the important role executives play in shaping corporate tax strategies.

As knowledge hiding is prevalent and often leaves severe detrimental consequences in its wake, it is imperative to place strategies on the front burner to identify its potential antecedents forthwith if there is going to be any headway to curtail the incidence of this phenomenon in organizations. Therefore, this study aims to examine the relationship between dispositional greed and knowledge hiding with the perceived loss of knowledge power as an underlying mechanism.

A multi-wave, three weeks apart strategy was used for data collection. A sample of 262 employees working full-time in various organizations operating across different industries in Nigeria participated in this study. Data were analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results showed that dispositional greed related positively to a perceived loss of knowledge power but insignificantly to any of the three dimensions of knowledge hiding (i.e. playing dumb, evasive hiding and rationalized hiding). On the other hand, the relationship between perceived loss of knowledge power and the three dimensions of knowledge hiding was positive. Finally, dispositional greed had an indirect positive relationship with the three dimensions of knowledge hiding through perceived loss of knowledge power.

All the variables were self-reported, which may lead to the same source bias.

Human resources managers can subject employees to cognitive restructuring training to help them identify thinking patterns that contribute to the perception of losing their power in the organization if they share knowledge and help reshape their perceptions regarding knowledge sharing. Management can use rewards to encourage employees to adopt knowledge sharing and refrain from knowledge hiding as a desired organizational norm.

This study offers novel insights that identify an underlying mechanism that encourages greedy employees to enact knowledge hiding.

The paper aims to examine the role of human greed in the determination of executive remuneration in the UK.

The paper reviews the past and existing regulation and corporate governance recommendations on executive remuneration.

The paper demonstrates that the failure of regulatory mechanisms to curb excessive executive remuneration can be justified on the grounds of human greed. Greed is facilitated by the potential conflict of interest that exists as a result of the executives’ position in the company. The position of the law has given greed the opportunity to manifest, making it quite difficult for executive remuneration to be effectively regulated.

The paper adds to the existing debate on excessive executive remuneration by demonstrating that human greed is the basis of excessive executive remuneration on which limited literature exists.

Gordon Gekko's words, although spoken by a fictitious Hollywood character, captures the spirit of a very real age: the Age of Greed. This was an age that, in my view, began when the first financial derivatives were traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1972 and ended (we hope) with Lehman Brothers' collapse in 2008. It was a time when ‘greed is good’ and ‘bigger is better’ were the dual-mottos that seemed to underpin the American Dream. The invisible hand of the market went unquestioned. Incentives – like Wall Street profits and traders’ bonuses – were perverse, leading not only to unbelievable wealth in the hands of a few speculators, but ultimately to global financial catastrophe.

Harmonizing religion and economic pursuits is treacherous because mixing the two rarely resonate with consumers, often resulting consumers’ greed perceptions. This paper aims to explore the antecedents and consequence of consumers’ greed perceptions in the context of for-profit religious-affiliated companies (FPRCs) and how they can harmonize religious and commercial missions by using different ad types (direct vs indirect appeal).

The authors conducted two experiments: Study 1 was an online experiment with participants from the USA collected through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n = 410) to reveal the overall mechanism. Study 2 was a field experiment (n = 292) to corroborate Study 1’s findings. The authors analyzed the data using a multigroup structural equation model.

First, consumers perceive greed against FPRCs’ dual identities incurred by their commercial activities. Second, when FPRCs obscure their religious identities by using third-party organizations (TPOs) as its promoter (i.e. indirect appeal), consumers’ greed perceptions decline, but this does not increase consumers’ future patronage intentions. Finally, in online and field experiments, consumers enhance their purchase intentions and behavior, respectively, under indirect appeal.

First, further investigation of the cognitive dissonance mechanism when consumers face seemingly contradictory identities of organizations is crucial to identify bottlenecks in promoting FPRCs’ commercial offerings. Second, examining boundary conditions of indirect appeal is important to enhance our understanding of FPRCs’ advertising, such as consumers’ awareness of TPOs’ intentionality. Lastly, not every type of indirect appeal brings the same effects. Future studies may explore diverse forms of indirect appeal, such as using artificial intelligence-based algorithms without TPOs.

Despite heightened interest in supporting dual missions (i.e. purpose and profit), this study shows why doing well while doing good is inherently challenging in practice creating marketing liability. To deal with this, the present findings suggest that, first, rather than exposing an FPRC’s religious (or communal) identity upfront, providing subtle cues through a TPO of its religious affiliation can be persuasive to win the hearts of target customers. Second, given the short-term effectiveness of indirect appeal, FPRCs need to use both direct and indirect appeal flexibly, as each type of ad delivers a distinctive advantage. Lastly, indirect appeal is particularly effective in offline promotional activities in the context of FPRCs.

First, by meshing paradox theory, the authors show that dual identities of FPRCs expose them to a marketing liability that single-mission enterprises rarely face. Second, when FPRCs use indirect appeal, they face a tradeoff between mitigating greed perception and securing future patronage. Third, results from the online experiment and field experiment show when consumers’ intention and actual behavior align.

Analyzing how the post-Soviet transition interacts with the crisis of market finance exhibits a new “greed-based economic system” in the making. Asset grabbing is at its core and hinders capital accumulation. All the various privatization schemes have triggered off asset grabbing, asset stripping, and asset tunneling. A global contagion of such behavior has spread the power and cohesion of managers/shareholders (oligarchs) worldwide. Financial asset grabbing is less straightforward, though much widespread, and operates in financial markets through new financial products, securitization, firms buying their own shares, hedge funds, stock price manipulation, short selling, and the distribution of stock options.Shadow banking, and more generally a global informal economy, results from grabbing strategies in financial markets that breach the formal rules of capitalism. In alleviating and circumventing the rules, the oligarchy paves the way for economic malpractices and crime, calling capitalist laws into question.In such context, systemic greed underlies unconstrained maximization of relative wealth, for which asset grabbing is a rational means, in a winner-take-all economy. At the present stage of our research, a greed-based economy cannot yet be theoretically defined as a transition either to a new phase of capitalism or to another different system.

In this paper, we propose that the “powerful and privileged” sustain their way of life through greed and they sustain the lives of others through trickledown sharing. Greed provides the powerful and privileged a buffer against famine. Trickledown sharing provides them a buffer against predation or war. The inspiration for this integration of greed and trickledown sharing as self-preservation strategies is a multi-selection model called skew selection. According to skew selection, when perennial organisms are subjected to cycles of famine and predation, greed and trickledown sharing increases the organism’s survival relative to a greed-only strategy. Skew selection is extended to explain greed and trickledown sharing among humans through the introduction of mogul games. The results of mogul games reported herein suggest that inequality is an emergent property of self-organizing systems and potentially an essential precursor to the evolution of social behavior. In the future, it is our hope that mogul game simulations will be employed by others to explore the effect of variation in cycles of predation and resource abundance on the rules of greed (resource acquisition) and trickledown sharing (resources redistribution).

This paper aims to explore the linkages between greed and governance failures in both financial institutions and financial markets.

The paper described how innovation changed the US financial system through an analysis of recent events, and employs the philosophic concepts of hubris and greed to explain certain developments.

The development of the shadow banking system and opaque products was motivated in part by greed. These developments made governance at both the institutional and market levels extremely difficult, if not impossible. In part the findings are limited by the current opacity of the markets and the dynamics of events.

The implication of the research is to reinforce the need for transparency if the risk of innovation in the financial system is to be both identified and managed. The creation of central clearing houses and/or exchanges for new products is clearly indicated.

Understanding the linkages between greed, hubris and governance in the development of opaque products provides insights of value to those trying to understand the current crisis – from academics to practitioners.