Seeking Pleasure or Avoiding Pain: Influence of CEOs' Regulatory Foci on Firms' Advertising, RD, and Corporate Social Responsibility

摘要

The question of how the characteristics of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) shape firm behavior has intrigued the minds of many academic scholars (Lewin and Stephens 1994; Rajagopalan et al. 1993; Papadakis et al. 1998). Empirical work in this area, however, has focused primarily on the role of CEOs' demographic characteristics such as their tenure, functional backgrounds, and education (e.g., Baker and Mueller 2002; Jensen and Zajac 2004; Palmer and Barber 2001; Bertrand and Schoar 2003; Papadakis et al. 2002) rather than the role of CEOs' personality traits. One personality trait which has recently gained considerable attention among psychologists and scholars of entrepreneur-ship is individuals' regulatory focus (e.g., Brockner et al. 2004; Bryant 2009; Hmieleski and Baron 2008; Tumasjan and Braun 2012; Wu et al. 2008). Drawing from upper echelons and regulatory focus theories, the authors propose that CEOs' degree of promotion focus positively impacts their firms' likelihood of investing in R&D, Advertising, and CSR. However, CEOs' promotion focus is also associated with a higher likelihood of firms getting involved in CSiR. The authors also propose that the link between CEOs' promotion focus and the outcome variables studied is magnified when the marketing department's power in the TMT is low.