Academic Events

CEOs’ Scheduling Styles and Corporate Social Responsibility

Room D403, Teaching Complex D Building

Yi Tang

University of Hong Kong

Scheduling is about arranging and organizing daily activities along a time continuum. This study examines CEOs’ scheduling styles and their implications for their firms’ strategic decisions in the social domain. Specifically, scheduling activities sequentially in event-time, rather than allocating each individual task a separate time slot in clock-time, involves viewing the arranged activities and their associated time slots as interrelated or connected rather than as separated or isolated, and subsequently activates a tendency for holistic thinking rather than narrow thinking. CEOs with an event-time (clock-time) scheduling style thus tend to consider more groups of stakeholders over a broader range (narrowly consider a smaller group of stakeholders), leading to greater (less) engagement with corporate social responsibility (CSR). We predict a positive (negative) relationship between CEOs’ event-time scheduling (clock-time scheduling) and CSR. We develop a novel measure of CEO scheduling styles using a named-entity recognition (NER) algorithm, and further validate the measures using human rating measures from a survey and measures from a supervised machine-learning categorizer (ML categorizer). Analyzing the language content of Q&A sessions given by 2,625 CEOs of U.S. publicly listed firms during quarterly earnings conference calls in the years 2009-2018, we find strong support for our predictions. A series of methods, including Bartik’s shift-share instrument variables (IVs), IVs based on historical political economy literature, difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) design, and correction for omitted confounding variables help establish robust identification. Additional analyses using survey and experiment provide convergent evidence.

Yi Tang is currently an Associate Professor in Strategy (with tenure) at the HKU Business School, University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Yi Tang’s research interests are in the intersections of strategic leadership, corporate social responsibility, firm innovation, and family business. His work has been published in leading journals including Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, and Journal of Business Venturing. He is currently sitting on the editorial boards of Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management, and Journal of Management Studies. Yi is currently a senior editor for Management and Organization Review and has served as a guest editor for Journal of Management Studies, Long Range Planning, and Family Business Review.