Organization and Strategy Online Seminar（2020-14）

Topic: Listening for Teamwork at the Top: Towards a Social Role Theory of CEOs' and CFOs' Strategic Public Language and Infomediaries' Evaluations

Speaker: Lorenz Graf-Vlachy,ESCPBusiness School

Time: Wedneday, 25 November, 16:00-17:30 pm

Location: Microsoft Teams Online conference room

Abstract:

Research has generated valuable knowledge about chief executive officers' (CEOs') communication with infomediaries, such as analysts and journalists. However, the extant literature neglects the fact that other top executives—especially chief financial officers (CFOs)—also influence infomediaries, perhaps in different ways than CEOs. Moreover, CEOs might need to align their communication with these executives in order to sway infomediaries' evaluations. We combine social role theory and language expectancy theory to introduce the concept of role consistency of executive strategic public language and the idea that audiences perceive certain dimensions of language to confirm the CEO's role but to disconfirm the CFO's role, and vice-versa. Specifically, we hypothesize that infomediaries evaluate a firm more positively the more its CEO and CFO use language that is consistent with infomediaries' expectations for the respective roles; that infomediaries respond more negatively when executives use role-disconfirming language than they respond positively when executives use role-confirming language; that the effects of the role consistency of CEOs' and CFOs' language on infomediaries' evaluations mutually reinforce each other; and that these effects are strongest at the beginning of executives' tenures. Analyses of data from 14,806 quarterly earnings calls between S&P 500 executives and securities analysts support our theorizing.

Introduction:

Dr. Lorenz Graf-Vlachy is Professor of Strategy at ESCP Business School in Berlin.

Dr. Graf-Vlachy's work has been published in, for example, the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, the Journal of Management, the Journal of Product Innovation Management, the Journal of World Business, Long Range Planning, and the Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems. His research has received awards from the Academy of Management (AOM), the European Academy of Management (EURAM), the Strategic Management Society (SMS), and the Förderkreis Gründungs-Forschung (FGF). Dr. Graf-Vlachy further won awards for teaching and reviewing. He serves on the editorial boards of Management Review Quarterly and Corporate Governance: An International Review.

//www.graf-vlachy.com/

Your participation is warmly welcomed!