Turning Bright to Dark: CEO Charisma, Dark Triad Traits, and Corporate Social Irresponsibility

Abstract

Many of the numerous corporate scandals and business failures over the past few decades seem to have occurred under the leadership of charismatic CEOs: apparently, charisma has a “dark side”. Yet, the extant academic literature on CEO charisma has been silent to date on the potential dark side of CEO charisma—prior theory and research has taken an explicitly “bright” view of the phenomenon that presumes that CEOs use their charismatic power to lead in an empowering manner that aligns and commits their stakeholders toward their organizations’ missions and values, and to presumably beneficial organizational and social outcomes. The very limited past research that has considered this issue has been conceptual in nature and has largely attributed the dark side of CEO charisma to leaders’ followership and/or the context. Therefore, we lack a systematic understanding of the characteristics of leaders that result in charismatic CEOs using their charismatic power in dark and harmful ways. We draw upon and integrate past notions of personalized leadership and research on dark personality traits to suggest that the dark triad (DT) traits—Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy—equip charismatic CEOs with the disinhibited, domineering, exploitative, and leader-focused orientation needed to turn charisma from bright to dark. In particular, we hypothesize that firms run by dark charismatic CEOs—i.e., those CEOs high in charisma and DT traits—will be associated with corporate socially irresponsible activities, both toward internal (employees) and external (customers) stakeholders, in ways that differ from charismatic CEOs. We develop and test our hypotheses on a sample of Fortune 500 CEOs using a video-metric approach to assessing each CEO’s charisma and DT traits. Given our highly supportive findings, we call for future research on CEO charisma to delve more deeply into the dark side of charisma.