Abstract
During decades literature has explored which factors favour crisis management and resilience in organizations. Researchers have focused on firm level determinants as well as on the role of CEO characteristics and decisions. Although literature argues on the potential role of manager’s affects (i.e., emotions) on crisis management and organizational resilience, empirical research is missing. We draw on psychological arguments on the role of affect on cognition to develop hypotheses on how positive and negative affective traits of CEOs condition two dimensions of firm resilience; severity of losses in the onset of a crisis and time to recovery. Preliminary results for a sample 156 family firms in Spain suggest that positive (negative) affective traits of CEOs before the Covid pandemic were positively (negatively) related to the severity of losses of the firms they managed. Results also suggest that CEO positive affective traits were positively related to a longer time to recovery.