Examining Chief Executive Officer’s Narcissistic and Humility Rhetoric

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) narcissism has received considerable attention across academia and practitioner-orientated outlets. While the voluminous research stream of CEO narcissism is mostly linked to a dark personality trait, research indicates that humility has the potential to counterbalance the detrimental effects of CEO narcissism. Given the important individual and firm-level outcomes of both constructs, a systematic assessment of how rhetorical elements (i.e., language reflective of a construct) in CEO speech is still missing. We exploit conceptualizations of both constructs as “polar opposites” to derive the dimensions of both constructs and to distinguish them analytically. We further argue that subtle yet observable rhetorical cues reveal important aspects of CEOs' personality inclinations. Our results, based on qualitative documents from publicly available CEO speeches, suggest that CEOs differ in using narcissistic and humility rhetoric. This holds true even if we change the coding scheme (i.e., assessing alleged narcissistic CEOs with humble rhetoric and vice versa). Although alleged humble CEOs use narcissistic rhetoric, indicating a general trend towards confidence-inducing vocabulary and CEO speech, alleged narcissistic CEOs employ more than twice as much narcissistic rhetoric than alleged humble CEOs. Alleged narcissistic CEOs use a third of humility rhetoric as alleged humble CEOs do. Therefore, we conclude that these differences are more likely to stem from CEO personality inclinations. We discuss the value of these unobtrusive measures and warning signs in theory and practice.