CEO values and corporate performance: A text mining and LLM-based approach

This study explores the relationship between CEO values and corporate performance across five standard dimensions of companies’ activity: liquidity, profitability, solvency, operating efficiency, and valuation. Utilising two complementary approaches—dictionary-based text mining and a ChatGPTbased approach to analyse over 4300 CEO interviews, we identified the CEO Schwartz value profiles and compared them with corporate outcomes. The findings indicate that that CEOs with a stronger emphasis on the Achievement value tend to be associated with higher corporate profitability. In turn, CEOs with a strong orientation toward Security are associated with higher corporate liquidity and long-term value creation. In addition, CEOs emphasising Self-direction or Stimulation are observed in firms with higher cash reserves and relatively lower operating efficiency. The results suggest that CEOs’ values may lead to different strategies and, as a consequence, differences in companies’ financial results. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the sources of these differences.