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This paper aims to managerial decision styles, following the General Decision-Making Style Inventory, as potential predictors of individual bias awareness and bias blind spots, with a focus on the rational decision style.

The research is based on a survey of 500 C-1 level managers within Forbes 2000 companies. It explores their decision styles and their assessments of their own and others’ decision behavior.

The results show that the awareness of one’s own susceptibility to biases and bias blind spots is highly dependent on an individual’s (self-declared) decision style and type of cognitive bias; decision-makers with a strong tendency toward a rational or spontaneous decision style see themselves as less vulnerable to cognitive biases but also show a much stronger bias blind spot than those with a tendency toward other decision styles. Meanwhile, decision-makers with a strong tendency toward an intuitive decision style tend to recognize their own vulnerability to cognitive biases and even show a negative blind spot, thus seeing themselves as more affected by cognitive biases than others.

To date, decision styles have not been used as a lens through which to view susceptibility to cognitive biases and bias blind spots in managerial decision-making. As demonstrated in this article, decision styles can serve as predictors of individual awareness and susceptibility to cognitive biases and bias blind spots for managers.

When CEOs are publicly weighing in on sociopolitical debates, this is known as CEO activism. The steadily growing number of such statements made in recent years has been subject to a flourishing academic debate. This field offers first profound findings from observational studies. However, the discussion of CEO activism lacks a thorough theoretical grounding, such as a shared concept accounting for the heterogeneity of sociopolitical incidents. Thus, the aim of this paper is to provide an archetypal framework for CEO activism.

The authors used a multiple case study approach on 145 activism cases stated by CEOs and found seven distinct statement archetypes.

The study identifies four main structural design elements accounting for the heterogeneity of activism, i.e. the addressed meta-category of the statement, the targeted outcome, the used tonality and the orientation of the CEOs’ positions. Further, the authors found seven distinguishable archetypes of CEO activism statements: “Climate Alerts”, “Economy Visions”, “Political Comments”, “Self-reflections and Social Concerns”, “Tech Designs”, “Unclouded Evaluations” and “Descriptive Explanations”.

This typology classifies the heterogeneity of CEO activism. It will enable the analysis of interrelationships, mechanisms and motivations on a differentiated level and raise the comprehensibility of research-results.

The framework supports executives in understanding the heterogeneity of CEO activism and to analyse personality-fits.

To the authors’ knowledge, this marks the first conceptualisation of activism developed cross-thematically. The work supports further theory-building on CEO activism.