Personality traits in the top management team. The role of Narcissism, Overconfidence and Extraversion

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Economics - International Economic Relations, grade: 2,0, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Wirtschaftswissenschaften), language: English, abstract: Due to the fact that most personality examinations concentrate on the Chief Executive Officer, this master thesis provides an explanation for the gap in empirical studies regarding the traits narcissism, overconfidence and extraversion in the top executive team. The purpose is to state why the remaining executive team is not targeted yet in personality research. With the help of a literature review on 80 journals, the obstacles on analyzing character traits in top managers are taken into account. Hereby, the research settings are divided into two main categories: self-report measures and the outsider perspective, which uses unobtrusive indicators or linguistic features in order to detect the three traits. In this context, similarities and differences are specified and several limitations on converting current research designs towards the board team are pointed out. Further, this paper criticizes measurement methods which use unobtrusive indicators, as they do not consider the importance of the Top Management Team (TMT) as an intervening mechanism. As a last step, this thesis provides a summary on the contributions to the gap in literature and recommends future research to stronger include the top team in regard of character attributes in order to detect firm performance more precisely.