Who’s at the Wheel? CEO Personality and the Drive to Internationalize
What our new research reveals about the CEOs who drive firm internationalization
There is a persistent assumption in leadership research that the most effective executives share broadly positive traits: conscientious, agreeable, emotionally stable. But what if some of the most consequential drivers of firm behavior lie precisely where we least like to look?
A study recently published in the International Business Review, co-authored with colleagues at Maynooth University and Victoria University of Wellington, takes that question seriously. We examine whether CEOs who score high on what psychologists call the “dark triad” of personality, comprising narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, are more likely to lead their firms into international markets, and why.
The dark triad: not just a liability
The dark triad captures three overlapping but distinct personality profiles. Narcissists display grandiosity, a need for recognition, and an intense drive for dominance. Machiavellians are strategic, calculating, and willing to manipulate to achieve their goals. Psychopaths are impulsive, low on empathy, and drawn to risk. These traits carry obvious costs in organizational life: bullying, unethical conduct, and poor interpersonal dynamics are well-documented correlates.
But the picture is more complicated than a simple moral ledger. Research across entrepreneurship and management has increasingly documented the upside. Individuals high on the dark triad are more likely to recognize opportunities, less deterred by uncertainty, and more willing to make bold, unconventional decisions. Our study extends this logic to international business, asking whether these same qualities translate into a propensity for internationalization at the firm level.
What we found
Drawing on data from 405 small and medium-sized firms in the United Kingdom and United States, we find that CEO dark triad personality is positively associated with the degree to which their firms pursue international markets. The mechanism, however, is not simply that dark triad CEOs take bigger swings. What appears to matter is that these leaders cultivate what the strategy literature calls organizational ambidexterity: the firm’s capacity to simultaneously exploit existing strengths while exploring new opportunities.
Ambidexterity, we argue, is exactly the kind of capability that dark triad CEOs are well-positioned to foster. Their appetite for short-term gain pushes exploitative refinement, while their relentless pursuit of status and dominance fuels exploratory risk-taking. Together, these translate into a balanced, forward-moving organizational posture that supports international expansion. Ambidexterity partially mediates the relationship between CEO personality and internationalization, meaning the personality effect operates both through this firm-level capability and through direct strategic choices at the top.
Why this matters
For decades, international business research has focused on what CEOs know and who they know: international experience, social networks, institutional knowledge. Our study draws attention to who they are. Personality is not merely a demographic variable to be controlled away; it shapes the strategic frame through which leaders perceive, interpret, and act upon opportunities in foreign markets.
This has practical implications for boards, investors, and governance structures. A CEO with dark triad characteristics may accelerate internationalization in ways that generate genuine competitive value, particularly in resource-constrained SMEs where the personality of a single leader has outsized organizational influence. At the same time, these traits carry real risks that governance structures need to account for. The question is not whether to avoid such leaders entirely, but how to channel their tendencies productively and build in the institutional checks that prevent the same boldness from becoming recklessness.
The findings also open up a richer research agenda. Future work might examine whether these effects vary across cultural or institutional contexts, how dark triad leadership interacts with team composition, and whether different combinations of the three traits produce different internationalization pathways.
Going global is never purely a strategic calculation. At the executive level, personality is very much part of the equation.
Interested? Read more:
Nooshabadi, J.E., Mockaitis, A.I., & Chugh, R. (2024). Chief executive officer’s dark triad personality and firm’s degree of internationalization: The mediating role of ambidexterity. International Business Review. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibusrev.2024.102296
The Silence Syndrome: What Multinationals Get Wrong About Corporate Language
New research on corporate language, socialization, and the conditions under which knowledge actually transfers
Picture this: a U.S.-based subsidiary in Shanghai introduces “English-only Fridays” to encourage use of the corporate language. The result is not better communication. It is silence. Employees disengage, avoid conversations, and curtail the very knowledge-sharing the policy was designed to promote. Researchers have called this the “silence syndrome,” and it captures a problem that far too many multinationals encounter without fully understanding.
Our new study published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Management sets out to explain why corporate language mandates so often fail to deliver on their promise, and what organizations should do instead.
The policy versus the practice
The study draws on data from 132 subsidiaries of foreign MNEs operating in Jiangsu Province, China, representing parent firms from 22 countries across Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia. Its starting point is a distinction that sounds simple but has substantial implications: there is a meaningful difference between formally adopting a corporate language and actually using it. Most of the literature has treated these as the same thing. They are not.
The formal adoption of a corporate language, typically English, is a top-down directive. It specifies what language communication should happen in. What it does not do is ensure that the resulting communication is meaningful to those on the receiving end. Subsidiaries can comply with such policies on paper while the practical reality on the ground looks quite different, a phenomenon organizational scholars have called ceremonial adoption. Our data show that formal adoption is actually negatively associated with communication quality. The mandate, in other words, can make things worse before it makes them better.
The relevance problem
To make sense of this, the study applies relevance theory, drawn from linguistics, to the organizational context. The core insight is straightforward: for communication to be effective, recipients must perceive the information as relevant, which means it must be cognitively accessible and contextually meaningful, not merely linguistically comprehensible. A message delivered in a language you are uncomfortable with, about practices whose organizational rationale you do not fully grasp, does not transfer knowledge. It generates cognitive burden and communicative withdrawal.
This reframes the challenge for MNEs considerably. The question is not simply which language to use but whether the information being communicated lands as relevant to subsidiary employees. That depends on communication quality, on socialization, and on employees’ actual proficiency in the corporate language, and these three factors interact.
What the findings show
Three empirical findings stand out. First, while formal corporate language adoption does not directly improve communication quality, high-quality communication does significantly improve knowledge transfer. The practical implication is that MNEs need to invest in how information is conveyed, not just in which language it is delivered. Clarity, contextual fit, and directness matter. Expatriate managers in high-context environments like China need to tailor communication to local cognitive frameworks, not simply translate headquarters messages and transmit them downward.
Second, when host country nationals actually use the corporate language in their daily interactions, this generates higher levels of socialization, both formal and informal, which in turn drives knowledge transfer. The causal pathway matters: it is not language use per se that helps transfer knowledge, but the social interactions that language use opens up. Joint meetings, cross-national teams, shared training programs, socializing during and outside working hours are the mechanisms through which knowledge becomes meaningful and transferable. Importantly, socialization substitutes to some extent for high-quality formal communication. Subsidiaries with rich socialization depend less on the clarity of formal channels because informal interaction fills in the contextual gaps.
Third, and perhaps most counterintuitively, language proficiency moderates these processes in ways that complicate the standard managerial prescription. The socialization pathway is most important precisely in subsidiaries where proficiency is lower. Where employees struggle with the corporate language, face-to-face interaction and deliberate socialization become more, not less, critical. Waiting until proficiency improves before investing in socialization is the wrong sequence. The research also finds that a high level of proficiency is not a prerequisite for effective knowledge transfer; employees can engage productively through socialization even with imperfect command of the corporate language.
What this means in practice
For MNEs operating across significant linguistic and cultural distance, these findings reframe the managerial task. Language training remains valuable, but it should be designed around high-relevance, practically grounded skills rather than formal proficiency benchmarks. More importantly, organizations need to build the social infrastructure through which language becomes a vehicle for shared meaning rather than a barrier to it. In the Chinese context specifically, this means attending to guanxi, to the development of personal relationships between expatriates and host country nationals, and to the creation of deliberate opportunities for interaction that bridge the in-group/out-group dynamics that can otherwise shut down knowledge exchange.
The broader lesson is simple but easy to overlook. A language mandate tells employees what to speak. It cannot, on its own, ensure they are actually heard.
Read more: Mockaitis, A.I., Tan, J., Zhu, J., Zhu, C.J., & Chen, Z. (2026). Corporate language and knowledge transfer in MNE subsidiaries: A relevance lens. Asia Pacific Journal of Management. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-025-10063-z
Professor Audra I. Mockaitis 