Presentation title: Shifting Gears: The Role of CEO Construal Shifts as a Driver of Firm Strategic Conformity
It’s my great pleasure to personally invite you and your (post-)doctoral students to our ICEBS Lecture by Danny Gamache on Tuesday, April 21, 2026, 4 PM to 6 PM in Room HK16 SR 117 (Seminar Room of DPE).
Daniel L. Gamache is the Terry Dean’s Advisory Council Distinguished Professor in the Department of Management at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. He received his Ph.D. in Strategic Management from Michigan State University. His research takes a behavioral approach to the study of executive decision-making with a particular emphasis on executive characteristics, compensation, and social evaluations of the firm and its leaders. His published work focuses on strategic implications of CEO characteristics, impression management, CEO relative pay standing, and strategic implications of media coverage. His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Personnel Psychology, and the Journal of Management. He is an associate editor at the Strategic Management Journal and an editorial board member at Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Administrative Science Quarterly. Daniel is also an International Research Fellow with the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation.
ABSTRACT OF DANNY’S TALK: Although scholars have begun to examine CEOs’ construal levels and their impact on strategic decision-making, this work has treated higher or lower construal levels as static rather than dynamic phenomena. We leverage the concept of construal shifts to examine how changes in CEOs’ construal levels over time affect the patterns of strategic decisions they make. We develop theory arguing that construal shifts (moving between higher and lower construal levels) act as a self-regulatory mechanism that enables CEOs to attend to and respond to external stimuli such as the strategic tendencies of their industry competitors. Thus, we posit that these CEO construal shifts drive firm strategic conformity. Further, we predict that construal shifts mediate the influence of a more distal CEO characteristic (CEO age) on strategic conformity. We also examine the moderating effect of industry dynamism on the importance of construal shifts throughout our mediated theoretical model. Using a novel empirical approach that draws on CEO language used in quarterly earnings calls to operationalize construal levels and shifts over time, we find robust support for the central role of CEO construal shifts in our mediated model.
I look forward to seeing each other, and I am very grateful to Danny for his visit to Passau – and to ICEBS and Carolin Häussler for supporting the visit!
We hosted the 13th Workshop on Top Management Teams and Business Strategy Research of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM) at our university on June 6 and 7, 2024.
The conference will be co-organized with University of Passau, Digital Platform Ecosystems and King's College, London.
We proudly presented the following keynote speakers
Donald C. Hambrick, Evan Pugh University Professor & Smeal Chaired Professor of Management, Pennsylvania State University, USA
William Ocasio, James F. Towey Professor of Business and Leadership, Gies College of Business and Director, Illinois Strategic Organization Initiative, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
and panelists
Elizabeth J. Altman, Theresa Cho, Tomi Laamanen, Pinar Ozcan
