Working Papers

The following working papers reflect my current research agenda in strategy, managerial cognition, and corporate governance. Most manuscripts are currently under review or in active development and are available upon request via email.

Stale in the Storm: Cognitive Flexibility in Long-Tenured CEOs During Crisis

Philipp Benedikt Becker, Patricia Klarner, and Lorenz Graf-Vlachy

Long-tenured CEOs are often assumed to become cognitively inflexible as firm-specific experience reinforces stable causal beliefs, strategic recipes, and entrenched thought structures. Crises challenge this assumption. They may loosen established cognitive constraints and renew flexibility, but they may also make experienced CEOs cling more strongly to familiar beliefs and strategic paradigms.

This paper examines whether experienced CEOs become stale or adaptive in the storm. We theorize that crises create ontological uncertainty because they unsettle assumptions about the underlying structure of the environment, not merely expectations about future outcomes. For early- and mid-tenure CEOs, such disruption may stimulate cognitive flexibility by prompting renewed search for explanations and solutions. For long-tenured CEOs, however, crisis conditions may crystallize prior experience and make familiar strategic recipes more salient.

When Boards Restrain Lobbying: Issue Vulnerability, Stakeholder Mobilization, and Regulatory Schemas

Philipp Benedikt Becker, Coen Rigtering, and Patricia Klopf

Why do firms sometimes reduce lobbying even when political engagement could be beneficial? We argue that boards are more likely to restrain lobbying when stakeholders mobilize around issues on which the firm is vulnerable, because such mobilization increases the risk that lobbying will backfire. Drawing on a managerial cognition perspective, we further propose that this effect is stronger when boards possess more developed regulatory schemas that help directors recognize when lobbying has become too risky.

We test these arguments using an exogenous shock to stakeholder mobilization around environmental and social issues. Using a dose-response difference-in-differences design, we find that more vulnerable firms reduce lobbying in contested issue domains after the rule change, especially when their boards exhibit stronger regulatory schemas. The study shifts attention from why firms lobby to when boards restrain lobbying under conditions of heightened nonmarket risk.

The Narcissism Greenhouse: CEO Personality as Density Distribution of States

Philipp Benedikt Becker and Sebastian Junge

Strategic leadership research typically conceptualizes CEO narcissism as a stable personality trait that remains invariant across contexts and over time. Drawing on Whole Trait Theory, this paper challenges this assumption by conceptualizing CEO narcissism as a dynamic density distribution of narcissistic states organized around a semi-stable dispositional mean.

We argue that analyst and public attention act as reinforcing social environments that increase the likelihood of narcissistic state expression. Over time, repeated exposure to admiration, visibility, and status recognition may gradually elevate CEOs’ dispositional narcissism, creating what we describe as a “narcissism greenhouse.”