Speaker：LI Shuping, Associate Professor, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Time：a.m. 9:00, Tuesday, December 2, 2025
Venue：Room 105, Building No.12, Wushan Campus
Organizer：School of Business Administration
Biography
Shuping adopts behavioral perspectives to study strategic leadership, corporate governance, and stakeholder management. She focuses on leaders’ incentives, such as career concerns, to understand how they are shaped by institutional (e.g., institutional logics), organizational (e.g., corporate governance), and individual factors (e.g., personalities), and in turn, how they affect organizational behaviors (e.g., stakeholder management) and performance (e.g., financial and social outcomes). Utilizing longitudinal datasets on firms worldwide, she has papers published in Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management Studies, and Journal of Corporate Finance. Shuping serves as the senior editor of the Management and Organization Review and the Co-chair of the IACMR macro research committee. She is also the co-organizer of 2026 Strategic Management Society Special Conference Hong Kong.
Abstract
This study investigates the influence of CEOs’ self-interested motivations on their firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR). As the threat of forced CEO job termination rises, signifying increased CEO employment risk, CEOs face competing motivations that shape their CSR decisions. Reconciling conflicting implications from applications of agency theory, we theorize a U-shaped relationship between CEO employment risk and CSR, which is driven by two distinct motivations that manifest differently at different levels of employment risk. First, the CSR-reduction motivation manifests as CEOs reducing CSR to secure their current jobs in response to low but increasing employment risk. Second, the CSR-increase motivation manifests at high levels of employment risk as CEOs increase CSR investments to build a reputation of integrity among external stakeholders, thereby creating future employment opportunities. Our empirical analysis, encompassing 3,295 CEOs in 1,857 S&P 1500 firms from 2002 to 2022, supports this hypothesis. Notably, the U-shaped relationship is more pronounced for financially more non-material CSR. Additionally, CEOs with better job prospects, stemming from having higher reputational and social capital, are less inclined to leverage CSR strategically in response to heightened employment risk, flattening the U-shape relationship. These findings enhance our understanding of when CEOs’ interests influence CSR, thereby contributing to the literature on strategic leadership and CSR.
