Sound and fury: A meta-analytic review of the validity of unobtrusive archival assessments of CEO personality

Abstract

Organizational scholars are increasingly interested in studying the nature and effects of the upper echelons of organizations and of CEOs in particular. Though many scholars researching the effects of personality in the upper echelons use traditional survey-based instruments, others have developed several novel, unobtrusive approaches to assessing personality. Although the utilization of such measures is increasingly common and accepted across various disciplines, there remains no comprehensive analysis of their validity to date. The present meta-analysis (k = 30) examines the structural and predictive validity of both traditional survey-based measures of personality and recently introduced unobtrusive, archival approaches for assessing Big Five personality traits. Our results suggest that when CEO personality is assessed with survey methods, the relationships both (a) between traits and (b) between traits and firm performance outcomes broadly reflect those seen in prior leadership literature. However, results from archival approaches demonstrated substantially higher intercorrelations between traits and failed to be predictive of firm performance outcomes. These findings suggest that the methods currently in widespread use fall short in terms of validity and that new approaches to assessment are needed.