Values That Shape Marketing Decisions: Influence of CEOs' Political Ideologies on Strategic Marketing Behavior, Firm Value, and Risk

摘要

In what ways do the personal characteristics of senior executives influence firms' strategic marketing behavior? The upper-echelon theory (Hambrick and Mason 1984) provides the theoretical underpinning of a relatively large stream of research that investigates the corporate impact of executives' demographic attributes, such as tenure, functional backgrounds, and education (e.g., Baker and Mueller 2002; Jensen and Zajac 2004). Very few studies investigate the influence of executives' personal values, and those that do mostly limit themselves to exploring the impact of these values on such corporate decisions as capital structures (Hutton, Jiang, and Kumar 2015), and corporate social performance (Chin, Hambrick, and Trevino 2013). In this article, we investigate if and how the personal values of the most powerful corporate executive-the Chief Executive Officer-directly or indirectly shape firms' strategic marketing behavior. Specifically, we examine whether and how CEOs' degree of political liberalism (i.e., support for the Democratic Party relative to the Republican Party) is likely to impact firms' innovation proclivity, propensity to form marketing alliances, and market performance. Based on the premise that liberal individuals tend to be more risk-taking (e.g., McAllister and Anderson 1991), we expect Democratic-leaning CEOs to be more risk-taking in their strategic marketing decisions.