LANGUAGE OF FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

Purpose – Can personality traits of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) be detected at-a-distance? Following newspaper speculation that the banking crisis of 2008 was partly caused by CEO hubris, this paper analyses the CEO letters to shareholders of a single bank over ten years for evidence of CEO personality traits, including: (i) narcissism (a contributor to hubris), (ii) hubris, (iii) overconfidence and (iv) CEO-attribution. Following predictions that hubris increases the longer individuals occupy positions of power, the research examines whether hubristic characteristics intensify over time.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper takes concepts of hubris from the clinical psychology literature and applies them to discourses in CEO letters to shareholders in annual reports. The research comprises a longitudinal study of the discretionary narrative disclosures in the CEO letters to shareholders in eight annual reports, benchmarked against disclosures in the CEO letters to shareholders of the previous and subsequent CEOs of the same organisation.

Findings – Results point to evidence of narcissism and hubris in the personality of the Bank CEO. Over half the sentences analysed were found to contain narcissistic-speak. In 45% of narcissistic-speak sentences, there were three of more symptoms of hubris – what Owen and Davison (2009) describe as extreme hubristic behavior. In relation to CEO overconfidence, only seven (2%) sentences contained bad news. More than half of the good news was attributed to the CEO and all the bad news was attributed externally. The research thus finds evidence of hubris in the CEO letters to shareholders, which became more pronounced the longer the CEO served.

Research limitations/implications – The analysis of CEO discourse is highly subjective, and difficult to replicate.

Originality/value – The primary contribution of this research is the adaptation of the 14 clinical symptoms of hubris from clinical psychology to the analysis of narratives in CEO letters to shareholders in annual reports to reveal signs of CEO hubris.

Keywords Discretionary narrative disclosures, Annual reports, Narcissism, Hubris, CEOs, Social psychology

Paper type Research paper

This paper proposes a taxonomy to assist in more clearly locating research on aspects of the association between corporate reputation and corporate accountability reporting. We illustrate how our proposed taxonomy can be applied by using it to frame our exploration of the relationship between measures of reputation and characteristics of the language choices made in CEO letters to shareholders. Using DICTION 5.0 software we analyse the content of the CEO letters of 23 high reputation US firms and 23 low reputation US firms. Our results suggest that company size and visibility each have a positive influence on the extent to which corporate reputation is associated with the language choices made in CEO letters. These results, which are anomalous when compared with those of Geppert and Lawrence (2008), highlight the need for caution when assessing claims about the effects on corporate reputation arising from the language choice in narratives in corporate annual reports.

Keywords: CEO, DICTION, Impression management, Language, Letter to shareholders, Reputation, Taxonomy

This paper proposes a taxonomy to assist in more clearly locating research on aspects of the association between corporate reputation and corporate accountability reporting. We illustrate how our proposed taxonomy can be applied by using it to frame our exploration of the relationship between measures of reputation and characteristics of the language choices made in CEO letters to shareholders. Using DICTION 5.0 software we analyse the content of the CEO letters of 23 high reputation US firms and 23 low reputation US firms. Our results ...

Contenido: Los sistemas de información contable. La contabilidad como sistema de información. Estados financieros. El balance de situación. La cuenta de pérdidas y ganancias. La memoria. El cuadro de financiación. El estado de flujos de tesorería. El estado de valor añadido. Problemática contable del impuesto de sociedades. La contabilización del impuesto sobre beneficios. Supuestos resueltos.