Buffering and bridging: How firms manage the burden of celebrity
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Buffering and bridging: How firms manage the burden of celebrity Weiping Liu 1 & Yanling Lian 2 & Cuili Qian 3 Accepted: 30 August 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract On the basis of the sociopolitical legitimacy perspective, we examine how firms respond to the celebrity pressure as well as the underlying mechanisms. We argue that the pressure associated with having a celebrity owner/leader will push firms to undertake activities that “bridge” with stakeholders by engaging in corporate giving while at the same time buffer against them by revealing less information through earnings management. The extent to which a firm engages in such maneuvers varies with the level of social and political pressure from stakeholders. Our hypotheses were supported by an analysis of 297 publicly listed Chinese firms whose owners had recently been included in a list of China’s richest people. The findings enhance our understanding of the sources of celebrity pressure and extend the research on celebrity and legitimacy management. Keywords Celebrity . Legitimacy management . Buffering . Bridging . China
Celebrities have become more prevalent and visible in the new media era and have attracted increasing attention from management scholars. Celebrities are those who attract a high level of public attention and generate positive emotional responses from
* Yanling Lian [email protected] Weiping Liu [email protected] Cuili Qian [email protected]
1
Department of International Business and Management, Faculty of Business, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, 199 Taikang East Road, Ningbo, China
2
School of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
3
Naveen Jindal School of Business, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA
W. Liu et al.
stakeholder audiences (Rindova, Pollock, & Hayward, 2006). Extant literature has modeled the creation of celebrity, and has investigated its economic values at both individual level (Hayward, Rindova, & Pollock, 2004; Lovelace et al., 2018; Treadway et al., 2009) and organizational level (Duan et al., 2018; Pfarrer, Pollock, & Rindova, 2010; Rindova, Pollock, & Hayward, 2006). However, more recent research suggests that celebrity can be a “double-edged sword” and may have negative consequences for both celebrity owners/leaders and the associated firms. Many successful business owners/leaders are frequently observed to have a fear of being “celebrated”. They do not want to appear to be too successful for fear that they will be “actively approached for assessments, fees, and philanthropic contributions” (Freeman, 1984: 178). John Mars, the billionaire CEO of Mars Inc., for example, prefers to keep a low profile and routinely refuses requests for media interviews (Sutton & Galunic, 1996). Fombrun (1996) introduced the concept of the “burden of celebrity” and argued that being celebrated may put a firm under a rather inconvenient social microscope. At the i
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