CEOs are responsible for ensuring that their organizations remain aligned with the environment, a consequence of which is that they must regularly evaluate and adapt (or persist with) their firms’ strategies. Prior research suggests that CEOs’ accumulated experiences influence the extent to which they are amenable to changing course strategically, but much less is known about whether some CEOs have a dispositional reluctance to deviate from their existing approach. Integrating research on strategic leadership, political science, and psychology, we theorize that a CEO’s degree of ideological intensity, or the strength of their ideological beliefs—without regard to the valence of those beliefs (i.e., whether liberal or conservative)—will shape the extent to which they are open to changing strategies. We specifically argue that ideologically intense CEOs will be likelier to persist with their current strategies, even in the face of negative performance feedback. Ideologically intense CEOs will also be more susceptible to in-group biases, a result of which is that their TMTs will be more ideologically homogenous. Testing our ideas on a sample of over 600 CEOs of S&P 500 firms from 2004 to 2022, we find general support for our theory.
