CEO and Organizational Celebrity: Investigating Media Attributions and Organizational Agency

CEO and organizational celebrity are two important social approval assets that have relevant, yet different, effects on organizational decision making processes and performance (Rindova, Pollock, & Hayward, 2006). Empirical research on these constructs has mostly focused on investigating the consequences of celebrity at different levels, and only few empirical studies have investigated how celebrity emerges at different organizational levels. Building on previous work on CEO (Hayward et al., 2004) and organizational celebrity (Rindova et al., 2006), and integrating attribution (Kelley, 1973), and framing theory (Entman, 1993), I develop predictions on the factors that affect the likelihood of CEO and organizational celebrity to emerge. I test the hypotheses on a sample of 158 Fortune 500 firms. The results show that the more the positive competitive actions undertaken by a company, the more likely is the emergence of organizational celebrity, but not CEO celebrity. However, contrary to current theory, the distinctiveness of those competitive actions does not increase their efficacy in affecting the emergence of celebrity at either level, unless communicated distinctiveness is considered. Nevertheless, the frequency and distinctiveness of competitive actions become important in determining celebrity when individual or organizational attributional frames are made more salient through the frames promoted in press releases. The results have important theoretical, methodological and practical implications.