| Author: | Wang, Qian |
| Title: | The behavioral imprint of founder CEOs : personality traits as drivers of firm performance heterogeneity |
| Advisors: | Cho, Vincent (MM) |
| Degree: | D.B.A. |
| Year: | 2025 |
| Department: | Faculty of Business |
| Pages: | vi, 167 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | The study examines how founder CEOs’ Big Five personality traits influence firm performance, drawing on the Upper Echelons Theory and the Big Five personality framework. It combines CEO personality data from Aabo et al. (2024) with newly collected CEO- and firm-level data mainly from ExecuComp and Compustat. A panel dataset of 1,788 CEOs from 893 S&P 1500 firms (2007–2018) is used to distinguish founder from non-founder CEOs and assess their differential effects on ROA and P/B ratio. Regression results show that, for founder CEOs, conscientiousness and extraversion are positively associated with both ROA and the P/B ratio. Openness is linked to the P/B ratio only, while neuroticism exhibits a divergent pattern, positively related to ROA but negatively to P/B. These findings suggest that the founder CEO’s dual-role identity moderates how personality traits translate into firm performance. The study extends the Big Five and Upper Echelons frameworks by positioning founder CEOs’ identity as a contextual moderator that shapes how executive traits impact performance. It challenges assumptions of trait uniformity across leadership roles and underscores the strategic relevance of founder CEOs in entrepreneurial and post-IPO governance. Future research could extend this work to start-ups, cross-national contexts, and high-tech industries, where it is likely that founder identity traits have a greater impact on firm establishment, innovation, and long-term performance. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8762.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 1.77 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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