Associate Professor
Strategy & Business Policy Department
HEC Paris
1, rue de la Libération
78351 Jouy-en-Josas cedex
France
Education
Ph.D. in Management
University of Mannheim
M.Sc. in Business Administration
Humboldt University Berlin
M.A. in Comparative Business Economics
University College London
Recognition
Best Reviewer Award, Global Strategy IG, SMS 2024
Outstanding Reviewer Award, Organization Science, 2024
Outstanding Reviewer Award, STR Division, AoM 2024
Winner of the BnP Paribas Vernimmen Teaching Prize at HEC Paris 2023
Outstanding Reviewer Award, Strategic Leadership & Governance IG, SMS 2023
Nominee, HEC Foundation Award “Initiative Pédagogique - Prix Roux de Bézieux”, 2022
Best Reviewer Award, Strategic Management Journal, 2022
Outstanding Reviewer Award, Journal of Management Discoveries, 2022
Runner up for the BnP Paribas Vernimmen Teaching Prize at HEC Paris 2022
Outstanding Reviewer Award & Reviewer of the Year Award, Strategic Leadership & Governance IG, SMS 2021
Outstanding Reviewer Award, STR Division, AoM 2021
Best Reviewer Award, ONE Division, AoM 2021
Outstanding Reviewer Award, Strategic Leadership & Governance IG, SMS 2020
Outstanding Reviewer Award, STR Division, AoM 2020
Best Reviewer Award, ONE Division, AoM 2020
Outstanding Reviewer Award, Stakeholder Strategy IG, SMS 2019
Outstanding Reviewer Award, STR Division, AoM 2019
Outstanding Reviewer Award, Stakeholder Strategy IG, SMS 2018
Outstanding Reviewer Award, STR Division, AoM 2018
Outstanding Reviewer Award, Strategic Leadership & Governance IG, SMS 2017
ABCD Award, OMT Division, AoM 2017
Outstanding Reviewer Award, STR Division, AoM 2017
Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation Best Dissertation Award 2016
Nominee DSEB Education Prize, Copenhagen Business School 2016
Outstanding Reviewer Award, Strategic Leadership & Governance IG, SMS 2016
Outstanding Reviewer Award, Stakeholder Strategy IG, SMS 2016
Outstanding Reviewer Award, BPS Division, AoM 2016
Best Conference Reviewer Award, AIB 2016
Best Reviewer Award, Corporate Governance SIG, EURAM 2016
Outstanding Reviewer Award, BPS Division, AoM 2015
Best Reviewer Award, Corporate Governance SIG, EURAM 2014
Welcome to my page.
I am the Dieter Schwarz Foundation Chaired Associate Professor of Strategy at the Strategy & Business Policy Department at HEC Paris. Before joining HEC Paris, I was a faculty member at Copenhagen Business School and a visiting scholar at INSEAD, Kellogg School of Management, the University of Antwerp, and the Stern School of Business.
I serve on the editorial review board of the Academy of Management Discoveries, Corporate Governance: An International Review, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. At the Strategic Management Society, I am the incoming Associate Program Chair (2023-2025). Before, I was a Representative at Large at the Stakeholder Strategy IG (2022-23) and served in this position on the Strategic Leadership and Governance Interest Group (2019-20). At the Academy of Management, I served on the Program Team of the Organizations and the Natural Environment (ONE) Division (2020-23) and on the Research Committee of the Strategic Management (STR) Division (2020-22).
On my site, you will find information about me and my research. Feel free to contact me.
Thanks for visiting!
RESEARCH
My research focus is on topics pertaining to or at the intersection of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate governance, both broadly defined. I am particularly interested in the antecedents and consequences of firms’ CSR initiatives and governance practices. I study these from different levels of analysis, including organizational elites (CEOs and members of the board of directors) and the firm.
I embrace a multidisciplinary, multitheory, and multimethod approach, since I view adaptability to the specifics of a project as key to successful research. For example, I combine insights from sociology, social psychology, management, and finance. Moreover, my research not only has a bearing on the literatures on CSR and corporate governance but also speaks to scholarship on strategic leadership, signaling, (behavioral) agency, stakeholder theories, and infomediaries. Besides using tools from the entire repertoire of quantitative methods, I employ methods ranging from quantitative content analyses to interviews.
My research program can be categorized along two interconnected lines of inquiry. First, I am interested in the causes of heterogeneity in firms’ CSR performance and governance practices and how these relate to CEO characteristics and values and firm-level factors. Regarding CEOs, I am particularly fascinated by the role of CEO values and characteristics in explaining differences in CSR across organizations and, for example, understanding the causes of corporate misconduct. At the firm level, I am intrigued by questions such as how firms use CSR to manage risk. In my second line of inquiry, I focus on the consequences of firms’ engagement in CSR on, for example, news media reporting about CEO compensation or employees’ evaluations of their CEO. I am also interested in the consequences of, for example, corporate misconduct for members of the corporate elite and how the consequences are affected, for instance, by the demographic characteristics of the elite or by their firms’ engagement in CSR.
Publications
The Ideological Imperative: Corporate Social Responsibility and News Media Coverage of Firms
with Yasir Dewan and Tal Simons, Organization Science, 2024, Vol. 35, No. 5, pp: 1930–1955.
Although prior research attributes news media coverage of firms to the alignment of firm behavior with societal expectations of appropriateness, the appropriateness of firm behavior is judged through an ideological lens. Therefore, the influence of a firm’s behavior on its news media coverage is likely to be contingent on news organizations’ ideology. Focusing on corporate social responsibility (CSR) as the focal firm behavior, we argue that conservative news organizations are less likely to consider CSR an appropriate firm behavior because conservatives view CSR as privileging progressive ideals and as undermining shareholder interests. As such, we hypothesize that compared with other news organizations, conservative news organizations are less likely to cover socially responsible firms positively. This relationship is likely to be strengthened for firms led by conservative chief executive officers and for firms with poor stock market performance. We examined the coverage of the S&P 1500 firms from 2002 through 2011 in U.S. newspapers and found support for our hypotheses that compared with other newspapers, conservative newspapers report less positively about socially responsible firms and that this effect is strengthened for conservative-led firms. In contrast to what we expected, however, we found some evidence that socially responsible firms with a strong stock market performance are, in fact, covered less positively in conservative newspapers. Taken together, our theory and findings contribute to an understanding of how the news media’s ideological heterogeneity shapes the relationship between firm behavior (in our case, CSR) and news media coverage of firms.
Media Coverage: Brain for Business Podcast, Management Today
When Is CEO Activism Conducive to the Democratic Process?
with Aurelien Feix. Journal of Business Ethics, 2024, Vol 190, pp: 755–774.
Activism undertaken by CEOs has been on the rise in recent years. Research on this practice has been primarily concerned with determining the conditions under which a CEO’s public statements on sociopolitical issues are beneficial or detrimental to her firm’s business performance. We complement this instrumental perspective on CEO activism with an ethical investigation of the implications of CEO activism for the democratic process. Drawing on political philosophy, we show that the answer to the question of whether CEO activism is conducive to the democratic process depends on the view of democracy that is adopted. From the perspective of liberalism, the sole requirement that an instance of CEO activism must fulfill is that it is lawful, provided that the applicable law sufficiently protects people’s essential rights. However, from the viewpoint of republicanism, this is not a sufficient condition. Besides being law-abiding, CEOs should be “civic-minded” when intervening in public debates, i.e., concerned with the quality and fairness with which those debates are conducted. Based on the literature on republicanism, we suggest four possible criteria that civic-minded CEOs can apply to gauge the democratic conduciveness of a possible public intervention: added insight, timeliness, constructiveness, and transparency. Our article complements the predominantly instrumentally oriented literature on CEO activism and contributes, more broadly, to the literature that explores the normative dimensions of corporate political involvement, as well as to a growing strand of research that draws on philosophical theory to inform business leaders’ ethical decision-making.
Media Coverage: Forbes, The Banker, Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung, Ostfriesische Nachrichten, Koelnische Rundschau
HOW MUCH INFLUENCE DO CEOS HAVE ON COMPANY ACTIONS AND OUTCOMES? THE EXAMPLE OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
with Miha Sajko and Christophe Boone. Academy of Management Discoveries, 2022, Vol. 8, pp: 36–55.
How much of the total variance in corporate social performance (CSP) is explained by the CEO effect? To answer this question, we apply the novel ‘CEO in context’ (CiC) variance partitioning technique to two of the most widely used CSP datasets, KLD and Asset4. The CiC technique makes it possible to distinguish the amount of variance in CSP explained by CEOs from that of contextual factors related to the industry or firm. We find that firms and CEOs explain the majority of variation in CSP. The impact of CEOs is consistent between 27.9 percent and 28.0 percent and, when different subcategories of CSP are estimated individually, remarkably stable. The CEO effect is smaller for corporate social irresponsibility than it is for corporate social responsibility.
Media Coverage: Valor Economico, Le Monde, La Tribune, Business & Society Blog, CEOWorld Magazine, Future Talent Learning, Adi Gaskell’s Blog, Warwick Business School News - Core Insights: Sustainability, Harvard Business Manager (June 2021), PeopleManagement, Work Magazine (Summer Edition), ”CEOs’ Big Influence on Corporate Social Responsibility” Academy of Management Insights, 2021, HEC Knowledge
Most cited and second most read paper among all papers in AMD in 2022
Last to Come and Last to Go? On the Complex Role of Gender and Ethnicity in the Reputational Penalties for Directors Linked to Corporate FrauD
with Ivana Naumovska and Edward J. Zajac. Academy of Management Journal, 2020, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp: 881-902.
Scholars have found consistent evidence that directors who served on boards of firms accused of misconduct face reputational penalties in the director labor market. While this is often interpreted in terms of an ex post settling-up process that penalizes directors for failing in their role as monitors of management, the fundamentally social basis of the director labor markets suggests that the ex post settling-up process may also incorporate a resource-provisioning role for directors as conferrers of legitimacy. We analyze how evolving social norms that aim to redress the longstanding underrepresentation of female and ethnic minority directors may lessen—for these sought-after directors—the penalties typically imposed by the labor market in the aftermath of corporate misconduct. Using a proprietary dataset on financial misconduct and directors’ demographic characteristics, we find strong support for our hypotheses regarding a possible “reputational immunity” effect. We also provide supplementary analyses demonstrating the specific mechanisms underlying our predictions, and establishing the robustness of our results to a variety of alternative explanations. We discuss the implications of our theoretical perspective and empirical findings for future research on corporate governance, corporate misconduct, and the possible duality of minority status as it relates to discriminatory outcomes in modern labor markets.
Media coverage: HEC Knowledge, The Conversation (France)
Paywall free version on ResearchGate
Best Published Paper Award 2022 of the German Association of Business Professors (VHB)
Sucheta Nadkarni Award (Runner-up), SMS 2021
Feigenbaum Best Paper Award (Nominee), Israel Strategy Conference 2017
Best Conference Paper Award (Finalist with Honorable Mention), SMS 2017
Best Paper Award (Honorable Mention), Strategic Leadership & Governance IG, SMS 2017
Drilled to obey? ex-military ceos and Financial misconduct
with Irmela Koch-Bayram. Strategic Management Journal, 2018, Vol. 39, No. 11, pp: 2943–2964.
We examine the influence of CEOs’ military background on financial misconduct using two distinctive datasets. First, we make use of accounting and auditing enforcement releases (AAER) issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which contain intentional and substantial cases of financial fraud. Second, we use a dataset of “lucky grants,” which provide a measure of the likelihood of grant dates of CEOs’ stock options having been manipulated. Results for both datasets indicate that CEOs who served in the military are less inclined to be involved in fraudulent financial reporting and to backdate stock options. In addition, we find that these relationships are moderated by board oversight (CEO duality and independent directors in the board).
Media Coverage: Forbes, Time to Sign Off (in French), topmanagement.com (in Spanish), Ifeng.com (in Chinese), HEC Knowledge, MtSprout (In Dutch)
Signal incongruence and its consequences: A study of media disapproval and CEO over-compensation
with Jean-Philippe Vergne and Steffen Brenner. Organization Science, 2018, Vol. 29, No. 5, pp: 796-918.
We draw on the signaling and infomediary literatures to examine how media evaluations of CEO overcompensation (a negative cue associated with selfishness and greed) are affected by the presence of corporate philanthropy (a positive cue associated with altruism and generosity). In line with our theory on signal incongruence, we find that firms engaged in philanthropy receive more media disapproval for overpaying their CEOs, but they are also more likely to decrease CEO overcompensation as a response. Our study contributes to the signaling literature by theorizing about signal incongruence, and to infomediary and corporate governance research by showing that media disapproval can lead to lower executive compensation. We also reconcile two conflicting views on firm prosocial behavior by showing that, in the presence of incongruent cues, philanthropy can simultaneously enhance and damage media evaluations of firms. Taken together, these findings shed new light on the media as agents of external corporate governance for firms and open new avenues for research on executive compensation.
Paywall free version on ResearchGate or SSRN
Media Coverage: Forbes.com, HEC Knowledge, INSEAD Knowledge, Harvard Business Review France (French), Le Monde (French)
Best Published Paper Award (Finalist, Best Paper in the Strategy Division) of the German Association of Business Professors 2020
Feigenbaum Best Paper Award (Nominee), Israel Strategy Conference 2015
Best Paper Award (Nominee), International Corporate Governance Society 2015
Best Empirical Paper on Environmental and Social Practice (Runner-up), OMT Division, AoM 2015
Best Paper Award (Winner), General Track, Strategic Management SIG, EURAM 2015
Best Paper Award (Winner), Strategic Management SIG, EURAM 2015
Global cities and liability of foreignness
with Kristian Mehlsen. European Journal of International Management, 2016, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp: 78-94.
In this paper, we combine the concepts of location, liability of foreignness (LoF), and their relation to factors that drive multinational enterprises (MNEs) towards, or away from, global cities. We argue that three interrelated characteristics of global cities – cosmopolitanism, availability of advanced producer services, and interconnectedness – help MNEs to overcome the liability of foreignness. We operationalise liability of foreignness as institutional distance and analyse its influence on the worldwide location of a large sample of subsidiaries of Nordic and Japanese MNEs. Our results indicate that MNEs have a stronger propensity to locate in global cities than in metropolitan or peripheral areas, and that these locational choices are affected by institutional distance and industrial characteristics. The results provide empirical support for our argument that locating in a global city can reduce the liability of foreignness suffered by MNEs, and that global cities play a central role in the process of globalisation.
Best Paper Award (Nominee), 12. Workshop on International Management 2014
Work In Progess
[something on gender effects in employee evaluations of their CEOs]
with Isabelle Solal and Steffen Brenner
We explore the impact of gender on a CEO’s ability to garner the support of their employees. Employing the lens of social identity theory and status competition between groups to understand reactions to female leadership, we theorize that employees are less likely to approve of female than of male CEOs. Moreover, we consider how heightened perceptions of threat may moderate penalties for women CEOs, and posit that the approval gap will be wider when female leaders are perceived as more of a threat to the existing gender hierarchy, namely for male employees, and among firms that pursue diversity initiatives in support of women and minorities. Exploiting data from more than 1.2 million employee reviews of U.S. listed firms from Glassdoor, we show that female CEOs receive lower employee approval ratings compared to male CEOs, and that this is driven primarily by male employees. Our results are robust to controls for firm performance, reviewer ratings of employment conditions, as well as indicators of managerial quality as measured by educational credentials, board memberships, and other achievements. We further find that the organization’s diversity ratings moderate the relationship between CEO gender and employee approval. Implications for female leadership are discussed.
Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, OMT Division, 2023
OMT Responsible Research Award (Nominee), OMT Division, 2023
Responsible Research Paper Prize (Nominee), SMS 2022
Best Paper Award (Nominee), Israel Strategy Conference 2022
[Something about CEOs’ identity and their remuneration]
with Steffen Brenner. R&R Journal of Management Studies
Information barriers typically separate the private spheres of executives from their organizational lives, allowing executives to make controversial decisions at their firms while escaping the attention from individuals outside the organization. Against this backdrop, the news media eliminating informational barriers may serve an important social function by integrating both spheres. We argue that the CEO’s response to media reporting about their controversial conduct in front of a mass audience may specifically originate from the revelation in the executives’ immediate social environment. We use the social-cognitive lens to hypothesize that executives under media scrutiny are more likely to correct controversial decisions if they hold salient identities prescribing moral behavior such as being a parent or a charitable activist. This holds because the real or imagined confrontation with individuals tied to these identities tends to activate moral cognitive frames and hence raises the salience of the moral aspects of the decision. We performed two studies to test under which conditions CEOs would be more willing to give up pay when media report negatively about their compensation. The first is an observational study analyzing a comprehensive hand-collected biographic data set measuring salient parent and charitable activist identities of U.S. CEOs matched to compensation, media, and other data. The second is an experimental survey study on a sample of executives and directors. Both studies provide support for our hypotheses on the parent identity and partial support for the charitable activist identity.
Best Paper Award (Nominee), International Corporate Governance Society 2015
[Something on CEO Age and csr]
with Miha Sajko and Christophe Boone
Why do top executives differ in their values, and how is this heterogeneity reflected in organizational outcomes? To answer this question, we build on the dual aspect of an important CEO characteristic, namely age, to simultaneously examine how stable differences in values between executives and changes in values within executives over time affect firms’ social and environmental practices (SEPs). On the one hand, executives’ concern for stakeholders changes with age as they advance through their careers and thereby shift their priorities. On the other hand, age also reflects stable differences in values between adjacent birth cohorts who grew up in different historical periods. In this study, we integrate time-stable and time-variant perspectives on executives’ values by theorizing about how age simultaneously determines which SEPs initiatives CEOs prioritize more and the extent to which CEOs invest in SEPs. Our study provides important implications for research focused on the relationship between executives’ values and organizational outcomes.
Best Conference Paper Award, Gronen 2020
[something on decoupling and firms’ responses to stakeholder issues]
with Nikolas Rathert and Brayden G King
In studying organizational responses to stakeholder pressure, research has often assumed that organizations choose to respond in either a symbolic way or a substantive way. In this study, we consider the possibility that such responses are not an either-or choice when a stakeholder issue first surfaces but instead are sequential. With sequential responses, organizations first adopt a highly visible policy to acknowledge a stakeholder issue and subsequently implement the policy, suggesting that responses can unfold in multiple phases over time. Sequential responses and the resulting time between the distinct phases are the consequence of various challenges organizations face as they seek to implement a policy. Drawing on insights from the literature on policy implementation challenges and the resource-based view of the firm, we develop a theoretical framework around the capabilities and constraints that influence the timely implementation of policies that were previously adopted following stakeholder pressure. Using data that span a 13-year period and pertain to the adoption and implementation of policies by U.S. firms in response to stakeholder pressure around consumer health and safety, we find that firms with structural implementation capacities are more likely to implement policies in a timely manner. In addition, firms with attentional constraints exhibit a lower likelihood of timely implementation. Our study extends research on decoupling and organizational responsiveness by considering an alternative explanation of what are often regarded as symbolic responses and making explicit a new set of mechanisms that drive substantive responses.
[something on FIRMS’ responses to the Russo-Ukrainian War]
with Louis Vandepoele
We study firms’ reaction to an exogenous increase in the political risk associated with doing business in a foreign country that suddenly becomes delegitimized. Building on a legitimacy-based framework of political risk, we argue that business conduct in the delegitimized country creates legitimacy threats for firms as the population in the firms’ home countries contests the continuation of operations in the delegitimized country. In line with this argument, we contend that the extent of legitimacy threats firms experience is a function of their business exposure to the delegitimized country and, thus, that firms with greater business exposure to the delegitimized country are more likely to exit it. We further hypothesize that two forces, one on the level of firms’ home countries—greater public attention to the delegitimized country—and the other on the level of the host country—the degree to which the host country perceives firms’ home countries as adversaries—will strengthen the relationship between firms’ business exposure to the delegitimized country and the extent of legitimacy threats. We empirically test our arguments in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which, in the eyes of Western countries, morally delegitimized Russia as a business partner and, therefore, increased legitimacy threats for Western firms with business activities in Russia. The results from these tests are in line with our arguments. We conduct additional analyses to corroborate that legitimacy threats are the key mechanism explaining Western firms’ exits from Russia and test whether firms that exited Russia increased their business activity in neighboring post-Soviet countries. Empirical results lend full support to our theoretical arguments and reveal that Western firms that exited the Russian market indeed appear to re-direct their business with Russian customers to post-Soviet countries.
Best Conference Paper Award (Nominee), SMS 2024
Best PhD Conference Paper Award (Nominee), SMS 2024
[something on the relation between CEO narcissism and CEO activism]
with Ghina Chammas
CEOs of U.S. firms are increasingly engaging in CEO activism, wherein they take a public stance on various socio-political issues. While previous research has predominantly focused on the stakeholder reactions to this trend, there is a growing interest in its antecedents. Leveraging the inherently public nature of CEO activism as taking a public stance, we assert that CEO activism offers a natural outlet for CEOs to attract attention, a trait commonly associated with the prevalent narcissistic personality found among CEOs. Using data from 723 CEOs of S&P500 firms from 2014 to 2022, we find empirical support for our hypotheses that narcissism serves as an important antecedent to CEO activism. By offering a psychologically-oriented perspective on CEO activism, we complement existing views characterizing it primarily as an ideologically-driven phenomenon.
Best PhD Paper Award, Strategic Leadership & Governance IG, SMS 2024
Refereed Conference Proceedings
'Not My CEO': Employee Reactions to the Threat of Female Leadership
with Isabelle Solal & Steffen Brenner. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, OMT Division, 2023.
Short Selling and Performance on Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
with Vanya R. Rusinova. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, STR Division, 2019.
Distinguished Paper Award, STR Division, AoM 2019
Winner of the People’s Choice Award, ARCS 2019
Best Paper Proceedings, STR Division, AoM 2019
Best Conference Ph.D. Paper Award (Winner), SMS 2018
Best Conference Paper Award (Nominee), SMS 2018
Access to finance and corporate social responsibility: causal Evidence from a Natural Experiment
with Vanya R. Rusinova. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, STR Division, 2016.
Best Conference Paper Award (Nominee), SMS 2016
Best Paper Proceedings, STR Division, AoM 2016