CEO’s emotional expression and organizational performance: an empirical study based on deep learning text analysis
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3846/jbem.2026.26880Abstract
In the context of increasing market competition and stakeholder expectations, understanding how top executives influence organizational outcomes has become crucial for both academic research and business practice. While upper echelons theory has traditionally focused on demographic characteristics and cognitive bases of executives, there is growing recognition of the importance of emotional factors in leadership effectiveness. This study aims to investigate the impact of CEO emotional expression on organizational performance, addressing a significant gap in both upper echelons theory and leadership emotion literature. We constructed an organizational-level model based on upper echelons theory to explore this relationship. Based on 396 observations from 131 listed companies, the results indicate that the CEO’s positive emotional expression is positively related to organizational performance, while the negative emotional expression is negatively related to organizational performance. Theoretically, our study extended research on the upper echelons theory by identifying CEO’s emotional expression as a novel antecedent of organizational consequence, we also extended the literature of leader emotional expression by exploring its effect on organizational-level performance. The practical implications for senior leaders, CEOs, shareholders, investors, the general public, and policy makers collectively underscore the importance of emotional aspects in leadership and their wide-ranging consequences.
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CEO, emotional expression, organizational performance, upper echelons theory, deep learning, text analysisHow to Cite
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Copyright (c) 2026 The Author(s). Published by Vilnius Gediminas Technical University.
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