Recognizing CEO personality and its impact on business performance: Mining linguistic cues from social media

Upper echelons theory suggests that CEO personality will influence organizational performance. However, difficulty in measuring CEO personality restrains related research. We capture linguistic cues CEOs leaving on social media and recognize their personality by text mining. To our knowledge, it is the first study introducing social media text mining approaches into the research stream that empirically inquires and extends upper echelons theory. Then, we investigate the CEO personality's impact on both operational and financial performance. Results show that CEO Extraversion, Emotional Stability, and Agreeableness improve Cost Efficiency and Profitability, while CEO Conscientiousness reduces them. CEO Openness to Experience negatively influences Profitability, and all facets of CEO personality improve Employee Productivity except for CEO Conscientiousness. The contribution of our research is multi-sided: (1). methodologically, we introduce a text mining approach to measure CEO personality; (2). theoretically, we provide empirical evidence for upper echelons theory; (3). practically, our results help companies evaluate CEO candidates from a personality perspective.