Empirical Investigation of Chief Executive Officers' Personal Brand

Abstract

Leadership has been a topic of investigation in organizational studies for many years. Several researchers have investigated the ideal leader, and even more theories and models have been built around the concepts of leadership style, behavior, personality, performance, competences, skills and so on. However, studies of how these characteristics are combined as 'personal brands', and how they are perceived by the social environment are clearly lacking. The aim of the paper is therefore to identify the dimensions of CEOs' personal brand, in other words to investigate the aspects that apply to leaders’ social environment and to perceive and evaluate them. Using exploratory factor analysis on a Hungarian sample, three factors have been identified as the basis for CEOs' personal brand: competence, morality and humanity.