If the wind blows, adjust your sail: Political ideology, social responsibility, and performance

Drawing on the upper echelons theory and the attention theory, this study investigates the influence of a chief executive officer's political beliefs on the market value generated by corporate social responsibility investments. The empirical analysis on U.S. hotel companies over a 25-year period (1998–2022) reveals that greater misalignment between a chief executive officer's ideology and the national political climate leads to a weaker impact of corporate social responsibility-related activities on the market value. This result is significant because it suggests that chief executive officers' actions are not solely determined by their ideological stance—as the upper echelons theory predicts—but rather by the conflict they experience when the external environment contradicts their ideological beliefs, which is a theoretical extension.