RECOMENDACIONES

2.5.2.1. Language as a source to identify hubris

The potential to access hubris through one’s language is extremely important in the case of business leaders, given that CEOs belong to the top tier of the organisation and, they are, unsurprisingly, not an easy to reach population (Sadler-Smith et al., 2016). Because of this reason, at-a-distance measures, such as using language as a means to identify hubris, are often used. As

77 noted by Craig and Amernic (2011), “Assessments of a CEO and his or her leadership by any corporate stakeholder must usually be formed at-a-distance because of a lack of direct access to the CEO” (p.563).

Numerous studies suggested that language use is a means of revealing a variety of psychological conditions (Garrard et al., 2014). For example, Craig and Amernic (2011) suggested that certain personality aspects (i.e., self-confidence, need for power and other personality aspects as proposed by Hermann (2005)) can be revealed through language, hence analysing discourse has the potential to reveal narcissistic and hubristic traits. Polzehl et al (2010), in their research on personality assessment from speech, concluded that “personality is encoded in spoken communication” (p.140). In other words, language is a medium by which human cognition and personality can be directly accessed (Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010).

What is more, Garrard et al (2014) noted that “personality might predispose to the development of Hubris Syndrome” (p.2) as certain personality characteristics can lead an individual to seek powerful leadership positions in the first place. Similarly, Runesson and Samani (2015) noted that linguistic features in secondary data materials, such as a CEO’s letter to the shareholders, “can provide cues on a CEO profile, such as hubristic traits” (p.3).

Furthermore, it has been argued that the natural linguistic structures people use and the lexical choices they make can be classified as ‘honest signals’ or unconscious behaviours by which one expresses and communicates attitudes, positions and motivations (Pentland, 2008). ‘Natural’, in this case, means responses to open-ended questions, natural day to day communication between individuals, written or spoken text. These ‘honest signals’ allow the prediction of human behaviour in groups and affects how humans engage in activities such as negotiation, persuasion and decision-making (Pentland, 2008).

78 As noted by Craig and Amernic (2014), language used by CEOs “reflect on them as leaders, the leadership they provide, and the ‘tone at the top’” (p.74). Authors note that a CEOs language is a medium through which senior business leaders communicate their true attitudes, beliefs and values (Amernic, Craig & Tourish, 2010). CEO language also has the capacity to mark a ‘leadership dysfunction’ as described by Amernic and Craig (2013). The authors also note that using at-a- distance measures in the field of management research is not usual and has been applied to date in research of a similar type, such as decision-making (Amernic & Craig, 2013; Schafer, 2000). Overall, language is a rich source of data for those who are interested in the mental and cognitive state of an individual (Garrard et al., 2014), especially where such assessment has to be made at- a-distance. Even though people tend to convey particular messages intentionally in their daily communication, certain psychological and cognitive aspects of personality are unconsciously reflected in an individual’s language and can help to gain an insight into relevant personality characteristics and features (Garrard et al., 2014).

2.5.2.2. Research to date to determine linguistic markers of hubris

Because scholars rarely possess the level of access to CEOs that would allow for direct interviewing or a psychological analysis of a leader, the natural tendency in personality, operational code and similar types of research is usually dependent on written and spoken utterances produced by the research subject. In line with above, the research into a leader’s hubris has also traditionally relied upon assessment at-a-distance with the key underlying assumption for such an investigation being the idea that no direct access is required in order to gain some accurate and insightful information about the leader’s beliefs, traits and cognition. Such investigations have relied primarily on the analysis of secondary data, mainly the CEO’s letters to shareholders, in order to gain insight into a leader’s personality, and ultimately, their hubris.

79 Obviously, the use of secondary data in such research raises a number of methodological questions (see Schafer (2000) for a detailed review) with a key question concerning the extent to which a leader’s interview or speech is a representative of their true personality characteristics and belief system.

However, there are several reasons for using publicly spoken or written discourse in such research studies. First, it is assumed that “a leader’s public behavior is constrained by his public image and that, over time, his public actions will consistently match his public beliefs” (Walker, Schafer & Young, 2003, p.223). This assumption has been validated in a number of studies that have used the at-a-distance approach in their analysis (see Table 2.7). The second, and more practical, reason is that for most leaders there are a number of publicly available spoken or written materials ready to be analysed. This helps to mitigate the issues of accessing the leader, especially given that secondary data has been proven to be a valid and reliable resource for this type of research (see section 3.8.2 for justification regarding data used).

Although there has been some previous research into linguistic markers of political leaders’ hubris, the use of linguistic analysis in determining the presence of hubris in business leaders is limited (Brennan & Conroy, 2013; Craig & Amernic, 2014). As summarised in Table 2.7 below, over the past five years there has been only a very small number of studies published which have attempted to identify business leaders’ hubris from their natural language use. Details of various methods used in previous research studies to explore and identify CEO hubris from spoken or written discourse samples of CEO language are summarised in Table 2.7 below.

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Table 2.7. Summary of the previous research on linguistic markers of hubris

Research Method(s) Material analysed Sample Words analysed Software

Craig & Amernic (2016). Are There Language Markers of Hubris in CEO Letters to Shareholders?

DICTION measures

Stage 1: Letters to shareholders of CEOs who were deemed to be hubristic. Stage 2: Letters to shareholders of random CEOs from FTSE 100 and FORTUNE 500 companies.

5 (3 hubristic and 2 non-hubristic CEOs). Unspecified exact number of neither hubristic nor non-hubristic CEOs used as a benchmark from FTSE 100 and FORTUNE 500 companies.

Stage 1: 34,500 (hubristic utterances). Stage 2: 334,000 (7742 words were from non-hubristic CEOs).

DICTION

Devlin & Lucey (2016). Is Executive Hubris manifested in CEO Letters to Shareholders? Manual content analysis

Letters to shareholders in 8 annual reports of a single company over 8 years benchmarked against 1 letter to shareholders of the previous and one subsequent CEO of this organisation. 3 (1 hubristic benchmarked against 2 non-hubristic). 22,746 (hubristic utterances) and 3519 (non-hubristic utterances) N/A

Craig & Amernic (2014). Exploring Signs of Hubris in CEO Language

DICTION measures

Speeches delivered whilst in a CEO position for one study subject and annual letters to shareholders for another study subject between 2007 and 2011.

2 (both hubristic). 332,000 (hubristic utterances for one hubristic CEO; utterances for the second hubristic CEO are not stated) DICTION Garrard et al (2014). Linguistic biomarkers of Hubris Syndrome Shannon entropy, N- gram trends and Keyness metric

Transcribed samples of weekly debates at House of Commons (questions-answers session) during the term of the study subjects period of office

3 (2 hubristic and 1 non- hubristic).

Number of words is not explicitly stated

MATLAB 2010, WordSmith

Brennan & Conroy (2013). Executive hubris: the case of a bank CEO

Manual content analysis

Letters to shareholders in 8 annual reports of a single bank over 10 years benchmarked against letters to shareholders of the previous and subsequent CEOs of this bank

1 (1 hubristic benchmarked against 2 non-hubristic). 7476 (hubristic utterances) and 2612 (non-hubristic utterances) N/A

Amernic, Craig & Tourish (2010). Measuring and assessing Tone at the Top using annual report CEO letters DICTION and close reading of selected letters Letters to shareholders of 91 FTSE 100 companies for 2006 and 71 for 1998; 94 FORTUNE 100 CEO letters for 2006 and 81 for 1998. Also 3 CEO letters to shareholders from 1990 to 2006 analysed in detail.

1. 3 (all hubristic). 2. Around 150 companies (approximately 600,000 words of text were analysed).

Approximately 600,000 words of text were analysed in total. Hubristic versus non- hubristic split is not specified.

81 Amernic, Craig and Tourish (2010) attempted to demonstrate that analysing text samples such as CEO letters to shareholders has the potential to gain an insight into what they called ‘tone at the top’. These authors analysed letters to the shareholders of Jack Welch (General Electric), Lord Browne (British Petroleum), Skilling and Lay (Enron), and the communications of New Century Financial Corporation. After detailed analysis using DICTION, Amernic, Craig and Tourish (2010) concluded that analysing discourse has a “strong potential to add a great deal and to furnish valuable understandings of the culture of the organisations concerned and the intentions of top management teams” (Amernic, Craig & Tourish, 2010, p.10).

Brennan and Conroy (2013) raised the question of whether personality traits of a CEO can be detected at-a-distance and whether there is a way to uncover underlying cognitive traits that might contribute to the development of hubris. To answer these questions, Brennan and Conroy (2013) analysed letters to shareholders of a single bank over a period of ten years and found the evidence of ‘hubristic-speak’ (45% of the sentences they analysed met three or more symptoms of hubris). Moreover, these became more pronounced over the time. What is more, the most pronounced symptom was CEO tendency to speak in a messianic manner (4th symptom) (Brennan & Conroy, 2013). Despite the findings, this research had several methodological drawbacks such as coder subjectivity, lack of coder cross-check and a general difficulty in replicating the methods due to the before-mentioned coder subjectivity.

Garrard et al (2014), in their research on linguistic biomarkers of Hubris Syndrome, examined transcribed spoken discourse samples of three British Prime Ministers (Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, John Major) and concluded that there is a marginal increase with time in discourse complexity in one of the analysed Prime Ministers (Tony Blair). This was in line with the research prediction that certain features of Hubris Syndrome are reflected in increased unpredictability

82 within the discourse sample. On the other hand, this conclusion seems to be unrevealing given a sample size of three individuals. However, given the context the sample size is bound to be very small.

Researchers have also found that hubristic research participants increased the usage in certain word frequencies that might be indirectly associated with symptoms of Hubris Syndrome (i.e., use of words ‘sure’, ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘important’) (Garrard et al., 2014). In addition, this research provided some suggestions for ‘candidates’ for linguistic markers of Hubris Syndrome, for example ‘no’ and ‘shall’ (Garrard et al., 2014). Related to the above, the authors also aimed to identify the frequency of ‘keyness’ values (words that that occur in a discourse sample with a significantly higher or lower proportional frequency) and found that the ‘keyness’ ratio of ‘we’ to ‘I’ was higher for hubristic Prime Ministers throughout their term in office. However, this finding has not since been replicated by other research studies, including the research described here. This suggests that the original proposition by Owen and Davidson (2009) that the use of royal ‘we’ is a unique symptom of Hubris Syndrome, might be tenuous and should therefore explored with caution.

In 2014, Craig and Amernic (2014) explored the potential of linguistic software DICTION variables to identify hubristic language. Even though researchers made some reasonable predictions regarding the links between DICTION variables and Hubris Symptoms (i.e., association between DICTION variable ‘Variety’ and Hubris Syndrome), the research was exploratory in nature and reached no definite conclusions.

One of the most recent research studies into the markers of Hubris Syndrome in CEO language was conducted by the same researchers, Craig and Amernic (2016). Similar to their earlier studies in the detection of linguistic markers of hubris, they used DICTION variables to look for the markers of hubris in 193 annual letters to the shareholders of CEOs from major companies. Of

83 these 193 letters to shareholders, 23 were produced by CEOs that were deemed by previous studies to have succumbed to hubris: including Lord Browne (British Petroleum), Fred Goodwin (Royal Bank of Scotland) and Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation). This study found that hubristic CEOs exhibited a high level of ‘Human interest’ and ‘Realism’ (two DICTION variables), which contradicts several symptoms of Hubris Syndrome as proposed by Owen and Davidson (2009). The authors concluded that “rather than identifying DICTION markers of hubris in the CEO letters of Browne, Goodwin and Murdoch, we have revealed the language pattern of a communication genre (Swales 1990) ─ that is, of the letters to shareholders of CEOs of large companies more generally” (Craig & Amernic, 2016, p.12). They have also noted that the link between hubris and language might be more complex than originally anticipated and that more research is required in this field, including strengthening and sharpening hubris conceptualisation and in turn, refining the relationship between hubris and language.

Finally, a study by Devlin and Lucey (2016) attempted to replicate the above-mentioned study of Brennan and Conroy (2013). They used the at-a-distance method to identify CEO hubris from the letters to shareholders of one American bank. Findings of this study indicated that 28.27% of sentences met the criteria for a diagnosis of hubris as proposed by Owen and Davidson (2009). The authors concluded that although this study could be criticised for the subjectivity of the method used (manual content analysis), consistent findings with the original study by Brennan and Conroy (2013) suggest that there is potential in the use of at-a-distance measures as a tool to identify CEO hubris.