CEO Temporal Orientation, Top Management Team Diversity, and Organizational Resilience

How do CEOs influence organizational resilience in times of crisis? Combining resilience and upper echelons research, we argue that CEOs prepare for and adjust to unexpected events in their environment based on their temporal orientation. We argue that CEOs' long-term orientation fosters organizational resilience during crises, which is reflected in their firms' lower severity of loss and time to recovery. We suggest that this relationship is moderated by TMT diversity. Studying 745 CEOs of S&P500 firms during the financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that firms led by long-term oriented CEOs face less severe economic losses but take longer time to recover from adversity. Yet, these firms recover more quickly when long-term oriented CEOs can draw on a diverse TMT. Our paper contributes to the research on organizational resilience by uncovering its microfoundations. We also contribute to the upper echelons research by unveiling CEOs' role in preparing for and adjusting to adversity. Lastly, we contribute to team research by showing how TMT functional diversity affects longer-run effects.