Upper echelons research has long argued that organizational outcomes reflect the characteristics of those who lead them. Scholars have shown that personality plays a central role in shaping how executives interpret information, make decisions, interact with stakeholders, and steer their organizations. Yet, despite a rapidly expanding literature on CEO personality and related constructs, recent reviews highlight persistent challenges: conceptual narrowness, methodological limitations, geographic concentration, and a tendency toward insularity rather than theoretical integration.
This Special Issue seeks to advance the study of personality in the upper echelons by encouraging submissions that challenge existing assumptions, expand theoretical lenses, deepen methodological rigor, and broaden contextual diversity. A recent comprehensive review emphasizes the need to move beyond overreliance on broad traits such as the Big Five and narcissism, integrate insights from personality psychology, employ multi-method assessment and reduce dependence on proxy measures, articulate mechanisms linking personality to organizational outcomes, explore non-Western contexts and alternative governance systems, and bridge macro–micro perspectives to understand how individual dispositions influence firm-level outcomes.
The Special Issue aims to deepen theoretical understanding of how personality operates within and shapes the upper echelons, encourage methodological innovation in assessing executive personality including multi-method designs and longitudinal approaches, broaden contextual relevance by examining executive personality across diverse governance systems and cultural settings, and integrate micro- and macro-level perspectives to illuminate how leaders' psychological characteristics influence organizational structures, strategic actions, culture, and performance.