Do CEO’s early-life marketisation experiences affect corporate social responsibility?

Abstract

As interest in the role of the early-life experience of CEOs on firms’ decisions and outcomes increases, this study examines how a CEO’s early-life experience of China’s Reforms and Open policy period may influence his/her strategic decision on corporate social responsibility (CSR). A longitudinal analysis of a unique, hand-collected dataset of Chinese CEOs in publicly listed firms from 2009 to 2020 suggest that CEOs experienced the preliminary stage of reform and opening-up era negatively influence CSR undertaking while the CEOs grew up through the profound stage take more CSR. We further find that CEOs’ overseas study experience weakens the negative impact of CEOs that experienced through the preliminary stage of Reform and Opening-up era and CSR whereas it has no significant impact on relationship between CEOs that experienced through the profound stage of reform and opening-up era and CSR. And market competition weakens both CEOs experienced preliminary and profound stage of Reform and Opening-up era’ relationship with CSR. Implications for the upper echelons theory and non-market strategy are discussed.

Keywords:

• CEO early-life experience
• upper echelons theory
• reform and opening-up
• CSR

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Editors and referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71672194, 72091313, 72102235]; Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation [grant number 2021JJ10066, 2022JJ30190].