CEOs face many challenging demands that put their health and effectiveness at risk. At the same time, first studies show that poor CEO health hurts organizational performance. Given the urgency of these findings, we extend prior research by taking a positive and action-oriented perspective and examining the relevance of CEO self-care (i.e., their health-oriented self-leadership) for organizational performance. Based on social information processing and conservation of resources theory, we hypothesize that CEO self-care fosters healthy leadership behavior among line managers within the organization: This behavior reduces emotional exhaustion in followers, ultimately mediating the effect of CEO self-care on increased organizational performance. Importantly, we also shed light on a critical boundary condition of this process and argue that the positive indirect effect of CEO self-care is stronger when the health-related values embodied by the CEO are congruent with the organization’s values (i.e., higher CEO person-organization value congruence). Our predictions are supported by multi-level and multi-source data of CEOs, CHROs, and employees in a sample of German SMEs. We contribute to the current debate on health in the executive suite and advance CEO research by identifying self-care as a powerful lever for top executives to promote their organization’s well-being and performance.
