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THE CONSISTENCY OF CEO’S FASHION STYLE AND PERCEIVED TRUST
The present research examines how a CEO exposed to the public through social media (e.g., Facebook) influences the trustworthiness of the CEO and his/her firm. In particular, we focus on and measure the consistency of a CEO’s fashion style across different occasions, and test the impact of the ‘fashion’ consistency on respondents’ perception on the CEO’s trustworthiness. Based on the previous literature on impression management, we define the consistency of a CEO’s fashion style as how similar (rather than different) the style of his/her clothes across multiple media exposures. We then manipulate the similarity of a CEO’s fashion style, which is the focal independent variable, and measure the subjects’ trust toward the CEO, which is the focal dependent variable. Study 1 is a scenario-based study in which participants read the description of either a fashion-consistent or -inconsistent CEO, and indicated the CEO’s perceived trustworthiness. We find that perceived trust is higher for the fashion-consistent CEO. Study 2 is an experiment in which participants read four news articles of a CEO featured on a social media (i.e., Facebook). Unbeknown to participants, fashion consistency was manipulated such that half of participants saw the news on a fashion-consistent CEO whereas the other half saw the news on a fashion-inconsistent CEO. Interestingly, the interaction between CEO gender and fashion consistency becomes significant, suggesting that for a male CEO, fashion consistency increased trust whereas for a female CEO, fashion inconsistency increased trust. The present research complements to the literature on the roles of fashion of employees including top managers on impression management. We also discuss other interesting and important implications of the results on the mechanism of the ‘fashion consistency’ effects.
