The produced executive

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Upper echelons research infers executive dispositions from the traces executives leave in public view: shareholder letters, earnings calls, photographs, and video. This inference rests on a premise that the observable surface authentically reflects the person. This viewpoint argues that the surface is increasingly an organizational product. Investor relations staff, ghostwriters, coaches, and now generative artificial intelligence produce the executive persona, the publicly observable presentation of the executive, as a managed asset. This observation yields two ideas. The first is person–persona decoupling, the graded, channel‐specific divergence between the real, historically formed person and the persona the produced surface expresses. The second is two causal systems. Audiences act on the persona while decisions are made by the person, so effects attributed to executive personality may run through either path. The account suggests that trait‐measurement validity may be a variable with a history rather than a constant, and it sets out a falsifiable research agenda for testing that possibility.