Executive Cooperativeness: Evidence from Conference Calls

Cooperativeness is essential to individual and organizational success. We exploit a unique feature of conference calls to study individual executives’ cooperativeness, indicated by their directly inviting colleagues to respond to analysts’ questions, and its relation with their career outcomes and firm performance. After validating our measure, we find that cooperativeness is associated with relevant executive characteristics. Older, more senior, and more experienced executives are more likely to display cooperativeness. We also find that cooperativeness persists but can be influenced by colleagues. Turning to the relation with career and firm outcomes, we find robust evidence of a positive association between cooperativeness and the likelihood of being promoted to chief executive officer (CEO). Appointing CEOs who are more cooperative than their predecessors is associated with an average three-day abnormal return of 0.6% around the announcement of the appointment. This paper was accepted by Ranjani Krishnan, accounting. Funding: W. Cai gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics of Columbia Business School. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.05902 .