I can only speak for places where I've worked and hired folks, but the consensus seemed to be that people who seek out the CEO role are highly correlated with a need to control everything and less well correlated with "team players" (or people who can work with peers in a give and take sort of situation). In acquisition scenarios such companies are sometimes much more keen on keeping the VP of Engineering ("get things done") person than the CEO ("I'm the boss") person.
That and the cited "common knowledge[1]" that the population of CEOs contains a higher percentage of sociopaths than the general population. I have yet to work at a company that considered sociopathic characteristics as a "positive" for the company.
[1] I really have heard this from multiple sources but have yet to find any well executed study that shows it to be actually true so I treat such pronouncements with a bit of skepticism. I have heard more than a few people who are disgruntled at losing their job will blame it on their boss being a sociopath. Such externalization of causes feels good psychologically but it is also self serving.
> In acquisition scenarios such companies are sometimes much more keen on keeping the VP of Engineering ("get things done") person than the CEO ("I'm the boss") person.
I think it's less "The Boss" than the fact that the CEO is generally more marketing/finance focused (far less relevant after a buyout as the purchasing company already has that established) than the CTO or VP of Engineering.
There are, of course, exceptions where a company gets bought specifically to install their CEO in the CEO role of the purchasing company.
There is such a series of studies - but they were all done by the same PI, who has built his career on redefining "sociopathy" over-broadly, more or less to enable him to have headlines like "20% of CEOs are sociopaths!"
edit: I don't know why this is being downvoted. Is it because I'm lampooning a "common knowledge" that people like? For pete's sake, the research paper that spawned this meme even got retracted by the authors: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23744006.2016.12...
That and the cited "common knowledge[1]" that the population of CEOs contains a higher percentage of sociopaths than the general population. I have yet to work at a company that considered sociopathic characteristics as a "positive" for the company.
[1] I really have heard this from multiple sources but have yet to find any well executed study that shows it to be actually true so I treat such pronouncements with a bit of skepticism. I have heard more than a few people who are disgruntled at losing their job will blame it on their boss being a sociopath. Such externalization of causes feels good psychologically but it is also self serving.