Founder CEO Narcissism And SMEs’ Internationalization Strategic Decision-making And Middle Managers’ Strategic Behavior

Chief executive officer(CEO)narcissism has emerged as a key predictor of a firm’s strategic decision-making.Burgeoning literature rooted in psychology suggests that narcissism,as a‘dark side’personality trait,becomes prevalent in CEOs,especially founder CEOs.Compared to the professional CEOs,founder CEOs have the unlimited and independent power to their own company,so that their characteristics are more likely to reflected on the strategic decision-making.The current literature displays contradictory influences of founder CEO narcissism for a firm’s strategic outcomes.It suggests that CEO narcissism can be either beneficial or harmful to a firm,depending on various conditions.This highlights many challenges and opportunities for further research.This thesis takes up the challenges and opportunities to examine investigate the microfoundations of narcissistic founder CEOs’influences on a firm’s internal decision-making process and decisions on its’external(international)expansion strategies.Building on the theoretical perspective of upper echelons theory,the thesis proposes two sub-studies to explore the influences of founder CEO narcissism on a firm’s internationalization decisions and another sub-study to focus on the impact of founder CEO narcissism on middle managers’ divergent strategic behavior.Together,these three interrelated sub-studies make a number of original contributions to the emerging research on the influence of the founder CEO narcissism on firms’ strategic decision-making.On the one hand,this paper demonstrates the role of founder CEO narcissism in firms’ internationalization decisions and offer new insights into what drives exporting SMEs’ international decision-making from a microfoundations’ perspective.The results provide valuable insights to explain the impact of founder CEO narcissism in an international business context through a mediating mechanism.Furthermore,by introducing situational cues,the study answers the call for the activating and attenuating situational factors based on trait activation theory.On the other hand,this paper looks inside the firm to advance the understanding of middle managers’ strategic behavior from an overlooked perspective of CEO narcissism.It also sheds new light on how narcissistic founder CEOs’social exchange interactions with middle managers shape the firms’ internal decisionmaking process,contributing to new knowledge of contextual conditions that weaken the negative impact of narcissistic leadership.