Why do some CEOs become celebrities while others don’t?
Celebrity benefits chief executives personally: increased pay, more opportunities to join boards, and protection from dismissal. But their firms do not enjoy similarly positive outcomes. These CEOs often demonstrate higher levels of complacency, risk-taking, and hubris. But what leads them to attain celebrity in the first place? Jeffrey B. Lovelace, Jonathan N. Bundy, Tim Pollock, and Donald Hambrick write that a CEO’s personal attributes, a firm’s non-conforming actions, and a CEO’s use of self-promotion tactics play important roles in attracting high levels of positive media attention — with implications for individuals, firms, and society.
Celebrity permeates all aspects of society, and the business world is not exempt from this phenomenon. Businesses play increasingly important roles in our lives, and their leaders are gaining greater levels of public attention than ever before, with some chief executives becoming celebrity CEOs. In the research literature, celebrity refers to the breadth of attention and positive emotional responses that a CEO receives from the public. This positive attention is primarily generated by the media, who use CEOs as the protagonists in their narratives explaining organisational performance and other critical organisational events.
For example, in her rapid and sustained rise to prominence as the former CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi received an abundance of credit for PepsiCo’s resurgence based on her strategic repositioning to focus on performance with purpose. Or consider Marissa Mayer, who in her move from fast-rising star at Google to Yahoo CEO was heralded as the saviour who would right Yahoo’s sinking ship. And then there is Elon Musk, often portrayed as the real-life genius/superhero/bad boy Tony Stark, whose creativity and vision will change the world through technology.
Generally, celebrity confers tremendous individual benefits to the anointed CEOs. Celebrity CEOs receive increased pay, more opportunities to join boards, and protection from dismissal. However, celebrity CEOs’ firms do not enjoy similarly positive outcomes. In fact, celebrity CEOs often demonstrate higher levels of complacency, risk-taking, and hubris that result in negative performance repercussions for their firms. That said, there is much more known about the individual and firm outcomes of celebrity than about what leads CEOs to attain celebrity in the first place.
Journalists often highlight CEOs that possess unique attributes because this information captures the attention of their audience. While being seen as interesting is partially a function of performance, numerous CEOs attain widespread positive attention without ever achieving anything of substance, and countless highly effective CEOs often attain little, if any, public admiration. In fact, CEO celebrity often demonstrates modest to little association with performance, which begs the question: why do some CEOs become celebrities, while others with seemingly equal accomplishments do not?
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Πηγή: blogs.lse.ac.uk
