Dual pathways from adversity: CEO childhood famine experience, motivational orientations, and organizational resilience

Abstract

Organizational resilience is critical for sustained development in turbulent contexts; however, the mechanisms linking chief executive officers’ (CEOs) early-life adversity to organizational resilience and their boundary conditions remain underexplored. Drawing on imprinting and upper echelons theories, we argue that childhood famine experiences shape CEOs’ motivational orientations and thereby influence organizational resilience. Two pathways were identified: achievement and differentiation orientations. The empirical results show that childhood famine experiences increased achievement orientation but decreased differentiation orientation. However, only differentiation orientation served as a robust mediating mechanism, whereas the indirect effect of achievement orientation was not significant in the full sample. Further analyses showed that the achievement pathway became significant only under low organizational slack and was not significantly moderated by ownership, whereas the differentiation pathway was stronger under high slack and nonstate ownership. Taken together, these findings suggest that the two motivational mechanisms rely on distinct organizational conditions.