In the afternoon of April 28, 2021, a DBM distinguished lecture, “Power of love: Intimate relationships of top executives and firm performance” was held at T2-306, given by Prof. Xu Huang.

Prof. Xu Huang is Chair Professor, Associate Dean of the School of Business, and the Head of the Department of Management, Hong Kong Baptist University. He is also the Director of the MBA program and MSc Business Management Program of the School of Business.

Before the lecture, Prof. Wenbin Liu, Dean of DBM, introduced Prof. Huang and gave a warm welcome. Prof. Liu also presented a souvenir to the guest.

Prof. Wenbin Liu presented a souvenir to Prof. Xu Huang

Prof. Huang investigated how top executives’ intimate relationships with their family members and romantic partners shape their leadership behaviors and firm performance. His talk is based on the findings of three projects.

In the first project,“Shadow of the prince: Parent-child rivalry”, he focused on the succession of family companies. He analyzed parent-incumbents’ coercive control over child-successors in family organizations, and “the paradox of empowering and dominating” resulted from this.

In the second project, using data from 164 family firms in Taiwan of China, Prof. Huang examined the impact of “political marriage”on firm performance. He found that political marriage benefits family firms the most when the duration of political marriage is long and the degree of romantic love of the married couple is low.

Finally, in terms of the relations between CEO marital status and Firm CSR performance, he believed that married CEOs are more likely to drive their firms to have better CSR performance; and a high level of power possessed by CEOs is likely to corrupt the beneficial effects of CEO’s marital status.

Prof. Huang in the lecture

During the Q&A session, Prof. Huang interacted with teachers; answered questions raised by the audience.

Q & A Session