Executives' narcissism and decision making: reviewing 20 years of accounting literature

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a systematic review of literature pertaining to how executive behavioral characteristics relate to financial reporting decisions. Design/methodology/approach – The authors review 44 papers published between 2001 and 2021 in top journals that are nested in leading business, economic and accounting journals. Findings – Through the systematic review, the authors provide a framework for the emergence of narcissism and how it relates to decision making and hence, firm performance. Additionally, this paper identifies different measures of measuring narcissism with their pros and cons and suggest that different measures lead to different outcomes in prior literature. Originality/value – The study contributes to a growing stream of research on executives' attributes influence on decision making. The authors recommend that future research may focus more on the chief financial officer (CFO) role as the majority of literature in CEO based. Additionally, the authors suggest that different settings may moderate the outcomes, and the authors propose that future research may be conducted to show how the regulatory environment affects or moderates narcissism effect.

Keywords

• Narcissism
• Executive characteristics
• Overconfidence
• Upper echelon theory