Penn State Smeal College of Business, United States
We seek to advance the literature on symbolic actions and executive symbolism by examining whether and how changes to organizational value statements made by new CEOs affect employees’ attitudes toward the organization. First, we suggest that changes in organizational value statements serve as symbolic actions that new CEOs can use to influence employees’ attitudes toward the organizational shared values and strategic themes the new CEOs want to put forward. We also examine the moderating effect that the values of employees have on this relationship: we suggest that the effect that changes in organizational value statements have on employee attitudes will be weaker in organizations in which the employee values are unaligned with the changes in values. Second, we suggest that changes in organizational value statements following CEO succesions reflect the CEOs’ personal values, and we posit that such changes will more strongly reflect new CEOs’ personal values in organizations with employees whose values are not aligned with the new CEOs’ values—i.e., in situations where symbolic action has more of a potential for aligning values. We tested our hypotheses on a sample of S&P 1500 firms that had CEO successions between 2011 and 2015. Our results are highly supportive. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and future research implications of our study and its findings.
