Abstract:

Corporate responsibility is central to contemporary debates on sustainable and responsible business. While governance and stakeholder pressures are often emphasised, Upper Echelons Theory (UET) suggests that responsibility outcomes may also reflect the dispositions of top executives. We examine how CEO narcissism and hubris relate to environmental (EP) and social performance (SP), and whether governance monitoring conditions these relationships. Using longitudinal data from Australian listed firms (2014–2024), we link CEO traits at time t to one-year-ahead Refinitiv environmental and social scores. Narcissism is captured via archival indicators of CEO prominence and power, and hubris via computational linguistic analysis of CEO disclosures. In mixed-effects models, narcissism is associated with higher subsequent SP, while hubris aligns with higher EP in baseline specifications. Governance monitoring weakens the narcissism–EP and hubris–SP links, indicating that sustainability outcomes depend not only on executive dispositions but also on monitoring intensity across environmental and social domains.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Sustainable and Responsible Business

Keywords: responsible business;leadership/management development;CSR;secondary research/concept paper

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Ms. Mengying Yang