Susanne Schmidt

Should Entrepreneurially Oriented Firms Have Narcissistic CEOs

Extant research has shown that firms with high levels of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) outperform competitors. The present study sheds light on this performance relationship in large, publicly listed high-tech firms by examining whether the strength of this relationship depends upon the CEO’s narcissism, an executive personality trait recently debated controversially in both academic and practitioner publications. A theoretically derived research model is empirically validated by means of multisource secondary data for 41 S&P 500 firms from 2005 to 2007. Findings indicate that narcissistic CEOs usually weaken the EO-performance relationship, although the opposite is true under some conditions, such as in highly concentrated and dynamic markets.

Advertising Repetition: A Meta-Analysis on Effective Frequency in Advertising

This study uses meta-analytic techniques to examine the number of exposures that maximize consumer response to an ad. The results show that in an experimental setting maximum attitude is reached at approximately ten exposures, while recall increases linearly and does not level off before the eighth exposure. The findings are of interest for two opposing schools of thought in the advertising literature on effective frequency. They support the repetitionists’ beliefs over the minimalists’ beliefs on the number of ad exposures needed for maximum consumer response. The study further investigates whether the repetition effects depend on contingent factors. Low involvement and spaced exposures enhance repetition effects on attitude toward the brand. Embedded advertising and massed exposures enhance the repetition effects on recall. Repetition effects decay over time for both attitude toward the brand and recall. The study provides important implications for researchers by contributing to the discussion on effective frequency and providing support for the repetitionists’ view. This view has implications for practitioners who try to optimize advertising frequency.

How can chief marketing officers strengthen their influence? a social capital perspective across six country groups.

This article examines the effect of the chief marketing officers (CMO) social capital along the dimensions of utilization of managerial ties, trust, and solidarity on his or her influence in the top management team (TMT) in a multicultural context. The study uses primary survey data from 412 CMOs across six country groups (Australia and New Zealand; Austria; Germany; China, including Hong Kong; Singapore; and the United States) to investigate the moderating effects of national culture on the relationship between social capital and the influence of CMOs in the TMT. The findings show that the social capital dimensions of managerial tie utilization and trust are strong drivers of a CMOs influence in the TMT and that these relationships are culturally dependent. Trust tends to be more effective when the national cultural dimensions of collectivism and uncertainty avoidance are high, and solidarity in the CMOs network relationship increases his or her influence only in collectivistic cultures.

The Contingent Role of Top Management's Social Capital on the Relationship between Entrepreneurial Orientation and Performance

Research has shown that firms with a strong entrepreneurial orientation (EO)—that is, those firms showing simultaneously high levels of innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking (Covin and Slevin 1989)—achieve greater market success and higher profitability than do firms with less or no EO (Green, Covin, and Slevin 2008; Le Breton-Miller and Miller 2009; Rauch et al. 2009). The literature has also identified several contingency factors on which this link depends (Lumpkin and Dess 1996), among which is the behavior of top management (Covin and Slevin 1991). Since many top managers spend a major share of their working time networking (Acquaah 2007), the question arises whether top managers’ social capital is beneficial in reaping the full performance potential of an EO. As the two citations at the beginning of this paper indicate, some successful top managers in entrepreneurially oriented firms, such as Apple and GE, rely heavily on cultivating social capital (for example Jack Welsh), whereas others do not (e.g., Steve Jobs). The academic literature contains studies that show positive performance consequences of well-connected managers (e.g., Park and Luo 2001), whereas others show that being too well-connected can lead to extensive, time-consuming obligations and to a manager’s being overembedded in the network, which limits information flow from other sources (Gu, Hung, and Tse 2008; Uzzi 1997). Driven by these contradictory observations in practice and theory, the present study uses a sample of 248 firms to derive theoretically and validate empirically a model that integrates top management’s social capital–conceptualized along three major dimensions of top managers’ social capital (Nahapiet and Ghoshal 1998)— into the EO–performance relationship. We build on Miller’s (1983) well-accepted understanding of EO as the simultaneous demonstration of innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking