The mediating Role of Anger in the Relationship between Executive’s Core Self Evaluation and their Individual Decision Making Comprehensiveness: Empirical Evidence

Abstract

Upper echelons theory posits that executives are influenced by their personalities in strategic decision making. One subordinate notion of upper echelons theory is that demographic variables of executives can be used as a valid approximation of executives' personalities and thereby serve as a predictors of strategic decision making. However, this notion has been questioned, and there has been demand for more direct measures of strategic decision makers’ personalities and the psychological processes underlying strategic decision making. Drawing on recent advances in research on upper echelons involving the use of core self evaluation to holistically assess the sense of a CEO's self potency, this chapter aims at contributing to the explanation of these psychological processes by developing and testing a model linking core self evaluation to individual decision making comprehensiveness and introducing anger as an emotion mediating this relationship. The findings suggest that anger is associated with lower levels of comprehensiveness and that higher levels of core self evaluation are associated negatively with anger and positively with comprehensiveness. These results provide support for emotion as an important mediator in relationships between CEO personality and the strategic decision making process.