Chief executive officers' appearance predicts company performance, or does it? A replication study and extension focusing on CEO successions

Hopp, Christian; Wentzel, Daniel; Rose, Stefan Manfred (2020). Chief executive officers' appearance predicts company performance, or does it? A replication study and extension focusing on CEO successions The Leadership Quarterly, 34(4), p. 101437. Elsevier 10.1016/j.leaqua.2020.101437

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In this article, we aim to replicate and extend a study that has revealed a link between naïve personality and leadership judgments and company profits. Rule and Ambady (2008) found that power- and leadership-related perceptions derived from CEOs' faces were significantly related to company profits. In our follow-up study and extension, we focus on CEO succession events to explore the longitudinal relationship between personality- and leadership-related perception ratings and company performance. We study the context of CEO successions to test whether variations in personality- and leadership-related perceptions from CEO faces are related to company performance and whether variations in company performance are associated with the type of CEO that is chosen. We can replicate the original correlative leadership effect using a temporal extension of the analysis horizon but fail to replicate the link between CEO leadership perceptions and company performance when using a different measure of performance and a different analytical approach to account for the longitudinal nature of our data. Our results have important implications for further theorizing on the relationship between subjective leadership perceptions and objective performance measures.

Item Type:	Journal Article (Original Article)
Division/Institute:	Business School > Business Foundations and Methods
Name:	Hopp, Christian0000-0002-4095-092X; Wentzel, Daniel and Rose, Stefan Manfred0000-0002-1327-0830
ISSN:	10489843
Publisher:	Elsevier
Language:	English
Submitter:	Christian Hopp
Date Deposited:	07 Jul 2020 11:47
Last Modified:	06 Aug 2023 01:34
Publisher DOI:	10.1016/j.leaqua.2020.101437
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Facial appearance, CEOs, Company performance, Causality, Replication
ARBOR DOI:	10.24451/arbor.11973
URI:	https://arbor.bfh.ch/id/eprint/11973