That Could Have Been Me: Director Deaths, Mortality Salience, and CEO Reprioritization
Mortality salience – the awareness of the inevitability of death – is often traumatic. However, it can also be associated with a range of positive, self-transcendent cognitive responses, such as a greater desire to help others, contribute to society, and make a more meaningful contribution in one’s life and career. In this study, we provide evidence of a causal link between CEO mortality salience and a subsequent increase in prosocial behavior, at both the individual and organizational levels. We find that CEOs experiencing a situation likely to trigger mortality salience (the death of a director at the same firm) engage in a series of actions reflecting a greater personal and professional focus on prosociality, including an increased presence on nonprofit boards, more frequent use of prosocial language, and higher levels of corporate social responsibility at both the CEOs’ home firms and the outside firms on whose boards they sit. We further show that the impact of director deaths is amplified in situations where CEO mortality salience should be most acute (i.e., high CEO-director demographic similarity, and sudden director deaths). In supplementary analyses, we also find suggestive evidence that CEO prosociality is directed toward ingroups.
讲座时间：2018年3月6日上午10点
地点：行政东后座618会议室
Dr. Guoli Chen is Associate Professor of Strategy (with tenure) at INSEAD, one of the world’s top-ranking international business schools with the most diverse student profile and the largest executive education training programs. He received his Ph.D. in strategic management from the Pennsylvania State University. He teaches Strategy, Value Innovation, Incentives Design and Corporate Governance to various programs, including full time MBAs, Master of Finance, Executives and PhDs.
Professor Chen’s research focuses on the influence of top executives, and boards of directors on strategic choices and organizational outcomes, as well as the dynamics in CEO-board relationships and corporate governance. He is also interested in organizational growth, renewal and corporate development activities, such as M&As, IPOs and innovation. His work has been published in top academic journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, and Leadership Quarterly, among others. His papers have received many awards at the Academy of Management Conference and Strategic Management Society Conference. He is the Program Chair for the Corporate Strategy division of Strategic Management Society (SMS), and was a representative-atlarge at the Corporate Governance interest group. He served on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review. He also published several cases on Chinese companies, such as Huawei, Didi and SUNAC.
Because of his exemplary scholarship that promises to have an impact on future strategic management practice, Professor Chen has won the Strategic Management Society (SMS) Emerging Scholar Award (2016). He was also awarded the Singapore’s most influential business professors age 40 and under.
Prior to academia, Professor Chen worked as an investment banker at Daiwa Securities SMBC. He provided financial consulting in the areas of IPOs, fund raising, and company restructuring.
