Research on CEO political ideology has demonstrated the construct’s impact on many firm outcomes. Yet, political ideology does not exist in a vacuum; beyond representing a CEO’s values, political ideology also affects the CEO’s perception of the political environment. It remains unclear how a difference between the national political climate and the CEO’s own political ideology might affect strategic decision-making. Applying upper echelons and threat response perspectives, we propose that divergence between the national political climate and the CEO’s own ideology provokes a threat response, leading CEOs to cut R&D spending and increase retained earnings. We then examine two boundary conditions for this relationship. First, we propose that CEO wealth tied to the firm in the form of vested stock options will increase the perceived threat of ideology divergence, strengthening the threat response. Second, we propose that industry regulation will dampen the threat perceived from divergence, as well as hinder the CEO’s ability to respond to the threat at all because of greater stability and lower discretion, respectively. We test these predictions on a sample of S&P 500 CEOs from 2004 to 2017 and find support for our hypothesized relationships.

中文翻译：

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踩刹车：考察 CEO 政治意识形态分歧对企业反应的影响

对 CEO 政治意识形态的研究已经证明了这一结构对许多公司结果的影响。然而，政治意识形态并非存在于真空中。除了代表 CEO 的价值观之外，政治意识形态还会影响 CEO 对政治环境的看法。目前尚不清楚国家政治气候和 CEO 自己的政治意识形态之间的差异会如何影响战略决策。应用高层和威胁应对的观点，我们认为国家政治气候和 CEO 自身意识形态之间的分歧会引发威胁响应，导致 CEO 削减研发支出并增加留存收益。然后我们检查这种关系的两个边界条件。第一的，我们认为，以既得股票期权的形式与公司挂钩的 CEO 财富将增加意识形态分歧的感知威胁，加强威胁反应。其次，我们建议行业监管将抑制从分歧中感知到的威胁，同时由于更大的稳定性和更低的自由裁量权而完全阻碍 CEO 应对威胁的能力。我们在 2004 年至 2017 年的标准普尔 500 指数 CEO 样本中测试了这些预测，并找到了对我们假设关系的支持。