Abhinav Gupta

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Washington

Workplace sexual harassment remains an insidious yet pervasive component of organizational life. Building on research that has established that leaders play an important role in condoning or revoking sexual harassment, we theorize that a CEO’s appearance—specifically, the extent to which their face is prototypically masculine—can influence employee...

Research Summary What affects organizational units' propensity to learn from each other? Extending the insights of upper echelons theory to the business unit level, we examine the relationship between executive narcissism and inter‐unit knowledge transfer. We predict that the narcissism of executives heading business units is negatively related to...

RESEARCH SUMMARY Scholars have long recognized that interlocking directors act as conduits (or “pipes”) in the interorganizational diffusion of governance practices. Yet, this research generally depicts interlocks as homogenous, overlooking the possibility that directors differ in their beliefs about a given practice. Our study explores this idea i...

In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in the effects of organizations’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts on observers’ perceptions and behaviors. We extend this literature by drawing from person perception theories and ethics research to propose that CSR impacts shareholders’ approval of TMT compensation packages...

Employees increasingly want their employers to become more responsible corporate citizens. Here is a playbook for how employees can be effective change agents and how leaders can respond to employee activism.

Conceptualizing shareholder unrest as the aggregate scale and gravity of shareholder dissatisfaction with company practices, we examine the effects of two distinct types of shareholder unrest – wealth-oriented and corporate social responsibility (CSR)-oriented – on CEOs’ career outcomes. Drawing on the concept of settling up, we hypothesize that CE...

Research Summary We consider the link between firms' decisions to adopt a CSR executive position and the political ideology of prior adopter CEOs. We theorize that firms are more likely to adopt a CSR executive position when it has been previously adopted by conservative‐leaning CEOs at other firms, as opposed to liberal‐leaning CEOs. This effect i...

Research Summary A number of studies examine the extent to which boards compensate CEOs for their firm's performance (i.e., pay‐for‐performance), but these studies typically do not incorporate what CEOs actually do to bring about those performance outcomes. We suggest that directors will make stronger internal attributions about firm performance wh...

This paper argues that organizations tend to be more “open” or “closed” as a function of their members’ political ideologies and that this variation can help explain firms’ responses to social activism. Integrating research on social activism with political psychology, we propose that when firms experience activists’ protests, a liberal-leaning fir...

We investigate the dispositional sources of managerial discretion by theorizing that CEOs' personality traits affect the extent to which their firms' strategies reflect their preferences. In a longitudinal study of Fortune 500 firms, we examine the moderating influence of two personality traits-narcissism and extraversion-on the relationship betwee...

Research Summary: We argue that because charisma and narcissism represent widely held prototypes of effective and ineffective forms of leadership, respectively, the likelihood that a focal firm will imitate the practices of its peer firms is affected by these peer firms’ CEO characteristics. We theorize that peer firm CEO charisma enhances the foca...

We develop a new explanation for why some organizations are relatively evenhanded, while others are more disparate, in allocating resources to subunits. Recognizing the central role of chief executive officers (CEOs) in resource allocation, we argue that CEOs’ personal values regarding egalitarianism, as manifested in their political ideologies, wi...

We examine how directors’ political ideologies, specifically the board-level average of how conservative or liberal directors are, influence boards’ decisions about CEO compensation. Integrating research on corporate governance and political psychology, we theorize that conservative and liberal boards will differ in their prevailing beliefs about t...

Research summary: Why do firms vary so much in their stances toward corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Prior research has emphasized the role of external pressures, as well as CEO preferences, while little attention has been paid to the possibility that CSR may also stem from prevailing beliefs among the body politic of the firm. We introduce t...

Organizations are frequent targets for social activists aiming to influence society by first altering organizational policies and practices. Reflecting a steady rise in research on this topic, we review recent literature and advance an insider-outsider framework to help explicate the diverse mechanisms and pathways involved. Our framework distingui...

This paper examines how social activist tactics affect the diffusion of social-responsibility practices. Studying collegiate adoptions of a controversial supplier-sanction practice championed by anti-sweatshop activists, we compare how non-targeted organizations are influenced by different types of practice adoptions in their environment. Drawing o...

Studies of the effects of top management team (TMT) composition on organizational outcomes have yielded mixed and confusing results. A possible breakthrough resides in the reality that TMTs vary in how they are fundamentally structured. Some are structured such that members operate independently of each other, while others are set up such that role...

Research has begun to show that the political ideology of organizational participants is an important predictor of behaviors in organizations. While a number of recent studies have identified the impact of ideology on topics such as firms’ social participation and strategy, much more theory and research is needed to understand the full influence of...