The Role of Personality and Anger in Executive Decision Making : Empirical Evidence

Upper echelons theory describes that top executives are influenced by their personalities in decision making. However, so far top executives' personalities have been approximated measuring objectively observable characteristics, and then making inferences about underlying personalities. Due to problems associated with this imprecision, there has been a call for more direct measures of top executives' personalities. First, this paper aims at answering this request by assembling core self evaluation, narcissism, stability of self esteem and sensitivity to criticism as personality profile for executive decision makers. Second, we develop a model which explains how this profile relates to individual decision making comprehensiveness. Third, we introduce anger as a mechanism mediating this relationship. Finally we report the empirical setup to test our model.