The Generativity Mindsets of Chief Executive Officers: A New Perspective on Succession Outcomes

We apply the psychosocial concept of generativity, or one’s outlook toward the next generation, to the context of chief executive officer (CEO) succession. Integrating prior research on generativity and CEO succession, we identify two key orthogonal dimensions of CEO generativity: (a) the CEO’s degree of commitment to developing the next generation of company leadership and (b) the CEO’s degree of need to control the succession process and...