Research

Here you can find my published and ongoing projects

1) CEO (Liberal) Sociopolitical Activism and Firm Performance

In my dissertation I focused on the phenomenon of CEO activism, which I generally define as the extent to which corporate executives take public stances on sociopolitical issues. Examples of topics frequently brought up by top executives include climate change, gun regulation, religion, race and ethnicity, and LGBTQ issues. In order to refine the current definitions of CEO activism and identify what specific actions and characteristics qualify a CEO as an "activist", I first conducted a confirmatory qualitative study based on mini-case studies of CEOs who took public stances, which I titled “Towards a Holistic Definition of CEO Activism”. Analyzing CEO tweets, interviews and press releases I found that in order for a statement to be categorized as "activism", the issue must be 1) controversial (it alienates some stakeholders), 2) unrelated to firms' core business (extra-organizational) and c) aimed at society at large (rather than targeted towards the firm or some stakeholders only).

In my second essay, ‘“Silence is not an Option’: How Liberal CEO Activism Affects Firm Performance”, I describe in detail the extra-organizational and symbolic dimensions of CEO activism. Taking a departure from a traditional capitalistic system and neoclassical economic perspectives such as agency theory, I theorize that the upper echelons of the organizations use activism as a sensegiving process to increase employees engagement with the organization. I also investigate what the consequences of CEO activism are (on firm performance) when CEO' statements are perceived as a mere gesture and whether founders' CEOs are perceived by employees as more authentic when they speak out.

2) Outsider CEOs Human Capital and Firm Performance (title disguised to honor the blind review process)

  • 1st R&R at the Academy of Management Journal (paper coauthored with Vilmos F. Misangyi, Timothy Quigley, and Don Hambrick)

In this project my coauthors and I investigate CEOs' generic human capital (or top executives' transferable skills), an aspect of CEO's human capital that has often been given less importance than firm-specific or industry-specific skills in a CEO selection context. We develop new theory (and measures) of CEO's generic skills that, we argue, board of directors can use in a CEO selection context to appoint skillful executives, able to deliver superior firm performance. We argue that our theory is particularly relevant when board of directors have to choose among a pool of outsider CEOs.

3) CEO selection as risk-taking: A new vantage on the debate about the consequences of insiders versus outsiders

  • Strategic Management Journal, vol 40 issue 9 (1453- 1470)
    with T. Quigley, D. Hambrick, V. Misangyi

This study framed CEO selection as a risk‐taking approach, reconciling a multitude of different perspectives on the effects of the relationship between CEO origin and firm performance. We argued that outsider CEOs are riskier hires as compared to insider CEOs, with a greater tendency to generate more unpredictable and “extreme” performance outcomes—either positive or negative—as compared to insiders. We based this expectation on two complementary theoretical perspectives: human capital and information asymmetry. In a selection context, human capital theory is concerned with assessing what the candidate knows about the firm and whether his or her talent will be transferable to the organization. Conversely, information asymmetry takes the opposite perspective, asking what the firm knows about the candidate. Our multiple tests (matched pair analysis, propensity score matching, endogeneity checks) on a large sample of CEO successions, with controls for endogeneity, found that outsiders are indeed associated with more extreme performance outcomes than are insiders, thus reconciling decades of contradictory studies about the effects of CEO origin and firm performance.

4) CEO Inclusive Masculinity, Leadership Effectiveness and Organizational Culture

  • Target Journal: Journal of Applied Psychology (paper coauthored with Aparna Joshi, Vilmos F. Misangyi, and Brett Neeley)

In this project we update and validate a new leader masculinity scale that includes positive masculine attributes while excluding attributes traditionally associated to toxic masculinity. We test our new scale on a sample of Fortune 500 CEOs, assessing how inclusive masculinity affects employees' perception of leaders' effectiveness and organizational culture at large.

5) Corporate Equality Index, Organizational Ideology, and Institutional Investors

  • Working paper coauthored with Ryan Krause, Garry Bruton, Mavis Tang

6) Corporate Reputation as an Antecedent of CEO Sociopolitical Activism

  • Working paper coauthored with Jung-Hoon Han