Content
Dr. Moritz Appels (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
- Date: Friday, April 10th, 2026
- Time: 10:15 am - 11:45 am
- Location: Ludwigstr. 28, VG, Room 211b
- Title: Attraction via firm-CEO attribution: When Job seekers attribute firm-level CSR to CEO-level political ideology
- Abstract: CEOs have gained unprecedented public attention in recent decades, and job seekers increasingly consider CEO dispositions in their employer choice. Yet extant theory does not explain how job seekers form inferences about CEO dispositions in the first place. We introduce the Attraction via Firm-CEO Attribution (AFCA) model to explain this process. Fusing insights from signaling and attribution theory, the AFCA model describes when and why job seekers rely on observable firm-level signals to attribute unobservable CEO-level dispositions and subsequently incorporate these attributions in their employer choice. We provide an initial test for this model in the context of firm-level CSR and CEO political ideology attributions. Across four preregistered studies, we find that job seekers attribute CSR to CEOs’ liberal-leaning political ideology and leverage these attributions to assess their political fit with the CEO and thus their likely experiences as an employee of the company. A choice-based conjoint analysis further underscores that CEO evaluations in general function as independent, consequential predictors of employer choice. Our theory and findings thus contribute to our understanding of how CEO-level considerations enter contemporary talent attraction dynamics while identifying cross-level causal attribution mechanisms in job seekers’ interpretation of employer signals.
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