Psychopathic CEOs and the Employee Gender Pay Gap

Research Seminar

Management & Human Resources

Speaker: Ingo Weller

LMU Munich, Germany

Bernard Ramanantsoa room

Abstract:

An extensive body of research has studied the origins of the gender pay gap (GPG), either from a macro-level perspective (e.g., how equality laws reduce the GPG within an economy) or a micro-level perspective (e.g., how career choices affect male and female employees’ wealth differently). But little is known about the role of firms – the critical place where pay decisions are made and the foundations for the GPG are laid. We examine how psychopathic tendencies of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) affect the GPG in their firms. We integrate upper echelons theory with work on psychopathic leadership to argue that CEOs who score higher on psychopathic tendencies will widen the GPG in their firms. We test our model with a comprehensive and novel panel dataset that encompasses matched employee, firm, and CEO data from Finnish firms from 2009 to 2020. In line with expectations, we find a higher GPG in firms that are led by CEOs with a higher level of psychopathy. In additional analyses, we show that this effect is contingent on firm size, on whether the CEO is a founder and/or an entrepreneur, and on how dominant male attributes are in jobs and firms.

Authors: Steffen Burkert (LMU Munich), Aino Tenhiälä (IE Madrid), & Ingo Weller (LMU Munich)