Abstract
Research on performance effects of top executives’ personality has followed traditional approaches to personality research and has categorized traits based on their performance effects as bright and dark traits. While there is support for the positive effects for bright and negative effects for dark traits on performance, emerging evidence on executive personality traits challenges these claims. We meta-analyze 75 independent samples with observations from over 30 years of research on executive personality to reconcile the current debate on the performance effects of bright and dark traits. To clarify some of the inconclusive findings on the performance effects of executive personality, we identify country-level indicators as boundary conditions. Our findings demonstrate that though there are variations among individual traits, at a broad level both bright and dark traits are positively related to firm performance. The moderation effects of country-level factors such as board efficacy, auditing standards, and R&D spending suggest that trait centric view of investigating bright-dark trait and firm performance link is limited in its scope as it ignores the situational factors that trigger the expression of traits.
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