PhD Defence Laura A. Kirsch

Keywords: Responsible Leadership, CEOs, Corporate Social Responsibility, Machine Learning
 

"CEO Responsible Leadership: Exploration, Measurement and Impact"

In light of grand societal challenges and major corporate scandals (e.g., Wirecard, Volkswagen, Theranos), there is a growing expectation towards companies and their leaders to contribute to solving grand societal challenges. Against this backdrop, responsible leadership as a new leadership perspective gained momentum in academia and business practice. As CEOs have been at the forefront of those scandals and have considerable influence on their organisations, this thesis zooms in on the responsible leadership of CEOs and their effect on firms. 

Taking stock of the field, this thesis found that current research lacks a reliable instrument to measure the responsible leadership of CEOs. Thus, the thesis uses machine learning to develop a novel language-based instrument which can identify responsible CEOs by their words. Using a large-scale sample of international firms, the thesis shows that a CEO’s responsible leadership benefits both a firm’s social and financial performance.

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