Influence of CEO Attributes on Sustainability: From a Bibliometric Overview to a Systematic Review of the Socio-Psychological Aspects

Abstract

The responsibility of Chief Executive Officers (CEO) in proposing and integrating sustainability into corporate strategies has sparked academic interest. In order to provide a comprehensive understanding of this trending scientific field, this article aims to synthesize current knowledge on the role of CEO characteristics on corporate sustainability, identify limitations and knowledge gaps in the existing literature, and formulate a holistic and ambitious agenda to guide future research. To this end, we categorize CEO attributes into three aspects: functional, demographic, and socio-psychological. Through a bibliometric literature review of 727 articles obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, we analyze the systematic knowledge of diffusion patterns and the evolution of research trends in the field. We observe that current knowledge is mainly focused on the study of the following functional aspects: CEO power and compensation. In addition, scholars have begun to take an interest in CEO gender, education, and marital status as demographic aspects, and CEO narcissism and political ideology as socio-psychological aspects. Furthermore, given that the socio-psychological aspects of CEOs are the most recent and emerging field, a systematic literature review is conducted using a sample of 130 articles to identify limitations and gaps, and to propose an agenda to guide future research. We find that narcissism is a double-edged sword, with both negative and positive effects on sustainability, and that the reasons for these divergences need to be uncovered. In addition, researchers should focus on analyzing the combined effects of other psychological, ethical, cultural, and religious traits that are currently considered in isolation, as well as improving the current measurement of the various traits.