That Could Have Been Me: Director Deaths, CEO Mortality Salience, and Corporate Prosocial Behavior
研究发现，当同一公司的董事去世时，CEO的死亡意识会增强，进而推动企业增加亲社会行为或企业社会责任，尤其在董事去世情况更突显时效果更强。
Mortality salience—the awareness of the inevitability of death—is often traumatic. However, it can also be associated with a range of positive, self-transcendent cognitive responses, such as a greater desire to help others, contribute to society, and make a more meaningful contribution in one’s life and career. In this study, we provide evidence of a link between chief executive officer (CEO) mortality salience—triggered by the death of a director at the same firm—and a subsequent increase in firm-level prosocial behavior or corporate social responsibility (CSR). We further show that this core relationship is amplified in situations where the death of the director is likely to have been especially salient (i.e., the director was appointed within the CEO’s tenure, or the death was sudden/expected). In supplementary analyses, we find suggestive evidence of increased CEO prosociality in other professional domains as well as evidence that prosociality seems to be preferentially directed toward ingroups. This paper was accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations.