The Impact of CEO Intervention on the Performance of the Marketing Department

ABSTRACTDuring economic downturns, many business leaders choose to adjust their strategies to intervene, resulting in huge changes in the performance of the company's market department and hence affecting the operation of the enterprise. The chief executive officer (CEO), as the core figure of the company, plays a crucial role in this process. This paper aims to quantify CEO intervention and examine its impact on the performance of corporate marketing departments. Using a principal component analysis, I construct a comprehensive index of CEO intervention and find that there is an inverted U-shaped nonlinear relationship between CEO intervention and marketing departments’ performance. That is, with the increase of CEO intervention, the performance of the marketing department will improve at first, but when the CEO intervention exceeds a certain critical point, the performance of the marking department will decline. I also show that CEO gender and employment experience as moderating variables can significantly affect the inverted U-shaped relationship between CEO intervention and marketing performance, in which female CEOs will decrease the degree of curvature in the inverted "U" relationship, while CEOs without sales experience will increase the degree of curvature in the inverted "U" relationship.