IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/buseth/v30y2021i3p338-359.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

CEO personality and language use in CSR reporting

Author

Listed:
  • Fereshteh Mahmoudian
  • Jamal A. Nazari
  • Irene M. Gordon
  • Karel Hrazdil

Abstract

We explore the relationship between chief executive officer (CEO) personality traits and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. Upper echelons theory indicates that the values, experiences, and personalities of top organizational managers influence their organization's strategic decisions and effectiveness. We utilize IBM Watson Personality Insights software to infer CEOs’ personality traits based on their responses to questions raised by analysts during year‐end conference calls; we obtain CEOs’ Big Five personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—from which we compute a measure of their risk tolerance. Using a longitudinal dataset of Standard and Poor's 500 firms for 2008–2015, we document that high CEO risk tolerance is related to lower CSR report readability and smaller CSR disclosure volume. This finding indicates that executives who are comfortable with greater risk are more willing to supply stakeholders with reports that are shorter and require greater effort to understand. Exploration of the association between CEO Big Five personality traits and CSR report readability and disclosure volume allows key stakeholders to better comprehend CSR disclosures and connotations thereof. Overall, our results contribute to the debate on how CEO personality traits affect organizations’ CSR disclosure reporting strategies, and support upper echelons theory in the CSR setting.

Suggested Citation

  • Fereshteh Mahmoudian & Jamal A. Nazari & Irene M. Gordon & Karel Hrazdil, 2021. "CEO personality and language use in CSR reporting," Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(3), pages 338-359, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:buseth:v:30:y:2021:i:3:p:338-359
    DOI: 10.1111/beer.12347
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12347
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/beer.12347?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:buseth:v:30:y:2021:i:3:p:338-359. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/26946424 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.