CEOs’ Social Activism Can Be Homeruns or Strikeouts

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Published on: August 11, 2025 at 2:06 pm

CEOs who speak out about controversial social or political issues can gain or lose likeability in the eyes of stakeholders. It can be a masterstroke, a debacle, or a mixed bag.

Academy of Management Scholar Donald Hambrick of Pennsylvania State University, who cowrote an article in Academy of Management Review with coauthor Adam Wowak of the University of Notre Dame on this topic, said that they were motivated to research this subject by the dramatic increase in the incidences of CEOs speaking out about social and political issues that don’t have any bearing on their organizations’ bottom lines, at least in the near term. The large number of citations and amount of follow-up research indicate that their article has struck a chord.

“In general over the ages, this phenomenon of CEOs taking a public stance on thorny sociopolitical issues had been unheard of, but it’s become more and more common in the last few years,” Hambrick said. “We were interested in trying to build a theory based on logic about why CEOs would do this and what the consequences are.

“The stakeholder alignment model is that CEOs will do it in proportion to the degree that they anticipate that their stakeholders, especially employees and customers, will agree with and applaud what it is they’re going to say,” he said. “So they have to anticipate their sociopolitical stance, the political beliefs of these stakeholders, and then, after they engage in this behavior of speaking out on, let’s say, LGBTQ rights or the environment or whatever, the reactions from stakeholders will be in line with what it is their pre-existing convictions are.

“CEOs can gain ground in the eyes of some stakeholders, and they can lose ground in the eyes of other stakeholders, depending upon prevailing political sentiments.”

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A sample of Hambrick’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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