The Impact of CEO Narcissism and Counterproductive Work Behaviors in Involvement of Middle Managers in the Strategy Process

1. Introduction

Although organizational strategy has been traditionally recognized as the exclusive mission of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and top managers (TMs), the scope of the strategy process has been extended in recent years to include middle managers (MMs) because of their significant influence on the formation of strategy within organizations (Floyd & Woodridge, 2000; Floyd & Lane, 2000; Thakur, 1998; Balogun, 2003; Woodridge Schmid & Floyd, 2008; Conway & Monks, 2011; Huy, 2011; Jaoua, 2020, 2016, 2018 a, b, c; Tarakci, Ateş , Floyd, Ahn & Wooldridge, 2018). This important change heated up to a new level and the strategic roles of middle managers (SRMMs) were actively rediscussed and hotly debated, as a result drastically confirmed as one of the key strategic actors (Conway & Monks, 2011; Floyd & Wooldridge, 1992; Heyden, Fourné, Koene, Werkman, & Ansari, 2017; Huy, 2011; Jaoua, 2020, 2016, 2018 a, b, c). However, despite this interesting theoretical advance that improves our understanding of strategy process, the organizational settings of this potentially positive dynamic effects theoretically unknown. Nevertheless, most of the existing literature on the involvement of MMs in strategy process does not take into considerations the organizational factors that facilitate or hinder the SRMMs, (e.g. the effects of the predominant influence of the CEO on the involvement of MMs in strategy process.

More precisely, researchers have missed examining the relationship between the SRMMs and the CEOs own way of a strategy-making process which is greatly affected by their psychological characteristics. In fact, according to previous empirical researches, the psychological characteristics of CEOs represent one of the main factors that affect strategic and operational decisions in organizations (Hambrick, 2007). Many of these psychological characteristics are essential for CEOs to be successful at their job, while some of them consider it as the determinants of the firm performance. As one of the most vivid psychological characteristics seen in CEOs was narcissism which gained a lot of attention. Empirical studies in the field of leadership, behavioral corporate finance and psychology point out that narcissism is one of the most influential factors on a firm's strategy, performance, and decision making within a firm (Aktas, Bodt, Bollaert & Roll 2016; Chatterjee & Hambrick, 2011; Rijsenbilt, 2011).

Notwithstanding its important insights, to the best of my knowledge, the previous researchers on CEO narcissism (CEO–N) or the involvement of MMs in the strategy process did not explore the effect of CEO–N on SRMMs. Table 1 illustrate the research results for the relationships between our research constructs: CEO–N, CWBs-MMs, and SRMMs. Table 1 introduces evidence for the scarcity in the studies that integrate our research constructs: CEO Narcissism, counterproductive work behaviors of middle managers, and strategic roles of the middle of middle managers constructs in one framework.

Date: 29 October 2020.

*We reviewed and analyzed the abstracts of the most relevant articles to our study (Mohamed a, 2020:3).

**The Searching Period: from 2000 to 2020.

*** CEO–N = CEO Narcissism, CWBs-MMs = Counterproductive work behaviors of middle managers, SRMMs = Strategic roles of middle managers.