Steady at the helm: how CEO early-life disaster experience shapes CEO resilience

CEOs’ central role in navigating crises makes their resilience—the capacity to withstand and positively adapt to adversity—highly consequential. Drawing on imprinting theory, we propose that CEOs’ early-life disaster experience can foster such resilience. Consistent with the ‘broaden-and-build’ logic, we expect this capacity is reflected in a CEO’s ability to sustain a optimistic orientation in times of crisis. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as an exogenous shock, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis on S&P 500 CEOs over 2017–2022. We capture CEO optimism through the positive versus negative tone in CEOs’ emotional displays in earnings-call Q&A responses. We find that CEOs who experienced a disaster between ages 5 and 15 maintain a more optimistic orientation in crisis, and their firms exhibit stronger post-COVID performance recovery. By identifying early-life disaster experience as a foundation for CEO resilience, our findings advance research on the relationship between CEO private life experiences and firm outcomes.