CEO greed, corporate social responsibility, and organizational resilience to systemic shocks

In this study, we explore how top executives affect the well-being of multiple stakeholders and long-run organizational outcomes. In the context of the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), we examine how CEO greed impacts firms’ stance toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) prior to the onset of the GFC and how this, in turn, shapes firms’ fate during and after the GFC. We argue that CEO greed will be negatively associated with CSR, because in their unbridled pursuit of personal wealth, greedy CEOs are more likely to exhibit myopic behaviors and neglect investment in CSR. We also adopt a person-pay interactionist logic to theorize that the willingness of greedy executives to invest in CSR will be especially sensitive to different types of pay instruments. Next, we build on recent findings from research on CSR that suggest that stakeholder engagement is a defining feature of resilient organizations. We expect that, due to low CSR investment, firms led by greedy CEOs will experience greater losses in the short run and will take longer time to recover from the 2008 GFC. For a sample of 301 CEOs of public U.S. organizations, we analyzed the stock prices and found general support for our hypotheses

Guardians of the previous regime:Post-CEO succession factional subgroups and firm performance

How can new CEOs – as the architects of their top management teams (TMT) – compose the executive group to realize high performance? We attend to this question by drawing on the notion of factional subgroups. We argue that TMT change after a CEO succession event can trigger a factional faultline between executives hired by the new CEO, and executives who had been TMT members prior to succession (the “guardians-of-the-previous-regime”). Such faultlines might activate disruptive TMT processes in the succession's aftermath and, thus, hurt post-succession firm performance. We also argue that the detrimental effects of factional subgroups strengthen under conditions of poor pre-succession firm performance and predecessor dismissal, but mute in situations of orderly (follower) succession. Overall, our research links faultlines theory with CEO succession research to advance our understanding of how TMT reconfiguration in strategic leadership transitions impacts organizations

From Product to Total Solution: An Enriched Channel Perspective

In the last decade, a fundamental phenomenon came to the fore in the business environment: more and more companies are offering total solutions to their customer instead of standardized products or services. Although this trend has already been studied extensively in literature, little has been said about the impact of this phenomenon on the supplier's channel management. This article develops propositions concerning the influence of a total solutions strategy on a company's channel management, rooted on an extensive literature review and case-based research in the Belgian industrial market