The CEO’s “Final Act”: Position Mortality and the Quest for Existential Continuity

This study examines how CEOs’ career horizons shape engagement in prosocial behavior, focusing on ESG initiatives, and introduces the concept of position mortality salience, intended as the awareness of symbolic finitude associated with organizational roles. Drawing on Terror Management Theory, we argue that CEOs’ motivations evolve across the tenure cycle: in early tenure, executives engage in visible prosocial actions to establish legitimacy and mitigate career concerns, while in late tenure, the impending end of their position triggers existential concerns, prompting renewed engagement to preserve self-worth, reputation, and symbolic legacy. Using a sample of 979 European Union firms, we find a U-shaped relationship between CEO tenure and ESG performance, which is amplified in family firms, a context of heightened symbolic value. Our findings illuminate the psychological foundations of strategic behavior across the CEO career cycle, showing that executives’ decisions are also shaped by deeper symbolic and existential concerns. Consistently, the study offers a novel perspective on the drivers of prosocial engagement in organizations, suggesting that such actions may reflect personally meaningful efforts to preserve self-worth, reputation, and symbolic significance as leadership roles approach their natural endpoints, rather than being driven solely by firm-centered or purely strategic objectives.