Executive Personality, Capability Cues, and Risk Taking

We adopt an interactionist logic to study the determinants of risk taking by chief executive officers (CEOs). We introduce the concept of “capability cues”—contextual signals that decision makers might reasonably interpret as indicators of their current level of overall ability—arguing that positive cues will induce boldness, while negative cues will induce timidity. Then, drawing from prior theory about how narcissists react to stimuli, we hypothesize that highly narcissistic CEOs will be relatively unresponsive to objective indicators of their performance; in contrast, highly narcissistic CEOs will be exceptionally emboldened by social praise (in the forms of media praise and media awards). We test our…

• AS
  Arizona State University
• PS
  Pennsylvania State University