Securities analyst responses to CEO charismatic images: A symbolic perspective.

摘要

This dissertation focuses on the effects of CEO charisma on the stock market. Although the business press often insists on the importance of CEO charisma for firm performance, the academic literature presents few studies on this subject, and none on the relationship between CEO charisma and the stock market. The study focuses on how CEO charisma affects one component of firm performance, the perceptions and judgments of securities analysts.;From a theoretical viewpoint, the dissertation extends and integrates Charismatic Leadership Theory (CLT) by focusing on external stakeholders (i.e., securities analysts) rather than internal organizational members. Moreover, the dissertation develops a new conceptualization of CEO charisma, CEO Charismatic Image (CCI). The hypotheses of the study focus on three dependent variables of interest: the favorability of analyst recommendations, the uniformity (standard deviation) of analyst recommendations, and the forecast accuracy of individual analysts.;The sample of the study comprises 367 US firms undergoing a CEO succession in the period 1990–1999. For each of these firms, data on favorability, uniformity and forecast accuracy were collected. Letters to the shareholders were content-analyzed to obtain CEO Charismatic Images scores. Data on control variables at multiple levels (analyst, CEO, firm) were also collected.;The main result of the study is that CEO charisma significantly affects the perceptions of securities analysts in ways that lead them to individually recommend the firm's stock to investors in a more favorable way; and, collectively, to present to investors more uniform judgments. These effects, however, are not accompanied by an increased accuracy in forecasting the future performance of the firm on the part of the analysts. CEO charisma represents therefore a potentially dangerous phenomenon in the stock market, leading to investor overconfidence.