How Values Drive Executives’ Words and Actions

Published on: April 24, 2026 at 2:35 pm

It can be challenging to understand why politicians or CEOs make their decisions or interpret their actions.

But a lot of how CEOs navigate their celebrity and public messaging about their decisions, plans, and vision “comes down to values,” said Academy of Management Scholar Jeffrey Lovelace of the University of Virginia. He, Jonathan Bundy, Donald C. Hambrick, and Timothy G. Pollock coauthored an Academy of Management Review research article on celebrity CEOs.

“There has been a lot of interesting work on ideology, and we have learned a lot from it, including that ideology is highly contextualized, for example, liberal versus conservative in the United States and left versus right globally,” Lovelace said.

“If we think about the question, ‘What are the values that are actually driving these executives to make decisions?’, perhaps we’ll be better positioned to understand exactly why CEOs make certain decisions when managing complex issues and public perceptions.”

A key question is: Are a CEO’s words and actions primarily driven by a desire to maximize profitability or power, or are there ideological or values-based motivations at play?
“Is it really about the self-versus-other focus, a more collective or more individualistic type of leadership approach?” Lovelace said. “Are decisions or public statements more about the idea of the need for power than they are about some sort of ideological perspective that’s driving this?

“What are some of these foundational values that are actually driving these decisions?” he said. “Finding answers to those questions can give us incredible insight into these CEOs’ proclamations and behavior.

“Not only would they be useful for us, but they’re much more generalizable across contexts, and so we would be able to better understand things, not only within the U.S.-based context, but tying them to these overarching values instead of to ideologies.”

For example, getting back to the foundations of values can allow researchers and analysts to draw parallels from President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement in the United States—and the CEOs who have publicly supported it—to the trends in Europe, including the anti-immigration/nativist, conservative/right-wing political movements that have gained traction in the Netherlands, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, and Finland.

“What’s going on there? What are the values of European politicians and business leaders, and how are they driving these decisions in very uncertain times?” Lovelace said.
“Values are playing a key role in what a lot of these executives are deciding to do in the current and political environment that we’re in.”

A sample of Lovelace’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree, Cum Laude, from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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