S&O Séminaire de Recherche: The Role of Top Management Characteristics and Personalities

L'institut S&O organise son séminaire de recherche mensuel en novembre sur le theme: The Role of Top Management [ENG]

S&O Séminaire de Recherche le 5 octobre de12h00 à 14H00 sur le campus HEC Paris, salle T 203

Pour notre séminaire d'octobre, nous avons le plaisir d'accueillir deux académiques: 
Abhinav Gupta, Associate Professor of Management at Foster School of Business

“Follow Him or Her? CEO Gender and Inter-organizational Imitation of Corporate Strategies”

Abstract: Prior research suggests that industry-peer organizations tend to imitate each other’s actions to alleviate uncertainty around strategic decisions, and, in this process, focal firms are likelier to imitate some referent firms than others based on their social structural attributes. We extend this research to argue that the imitability of referent firms’ strategic actions will also be determined by the gender of the CEOs leading those firms. Integrating insights from gender research, we hypothesize that the female CEOs’ strategic actions will be imitated at a lower rate than those of their male counterparts. We further posit that focal CEO’s gender and political ideology will moderate the effect of referent CEO’s gender. Using a longitudinal sample of S&P 1500 firms,we find broad support for our theory. 

Georg Wernicke, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Business Policy at HEC Paris

“Just Old, or from Another Era? The Multifaceted Effect of CEO Age on Firms’ Social and Environmental Practices”

Abstract: Why do top executives differ in their values, and how is this heterogeneity reflected in organizational outcomes? To answer this question, we build on the dual aspect of an important CEO characteristic, namely age, to simultaneously examine how stable differences in values between executives and changes in values within executives over time affect firms’ social and environmental practices (SEPs). On the one hand, age reflects stable differences in values between adjacent generation cohorts who grew up in different historical periods. On the other hand, executives’ concern for stakeholders also changes with age as they advance through their careers and thereby shift their priorities. In this study, we integrate time-stable and time-variant perspectives on executives’ values by theorizing about how age simultaneously determines the SEPs initiatives that CEOs prioritize the most and the extent to which CEOs invest in SEPs. Our study provides important implications for research focused on the relationship between executives’ values and organizational outcomes. 

Pour plus d'informations, veuillez contacter Iiris Sacchet: sacchet@hec.fr