The Resource Insecurity Mindset: Why CEOs from Lower-Class Origins Are Both Greedier and More Generous

Understanding how executives’ backgrounds influence corporate behavior is essential for organizational science and society. Previous research offers conflicting predictions about whether childhood resource scarcity leads to self-focused or prosocial tendencies, with evolutionary theories predicting greed and social psychology theories pointing to generosity. This contradiction is especially relevant for chief executive officers (CEOs), whose decisions significantly impact stakeholders. Here, we show that CEOs from lower social class origins engage in both more greedy behaviors (e.g., pursuing excessive compensation) and more prosocial behaviors (e.g., internal corporate social responsibility) than their higher-class counterparts. Using survey data from 135 S&P 1500 CEOs, we demonstrate that both behaviors stem from the same psychological mechanism: a resource insecurity mindset formed during childhood. This mindset makes lower-class origin CEOs simultaneously vigilant about personal resource accumulation and compassionate toward others facing constraints. We examine how CEO job insecurity and overconfidence influence these effects. Through experiments, coded CEO interviews, and executive qualitative interviews, we find broad support for our theory. These findings resolve a significant theoretical contradiction by showing that self-serving and other-serving behaviors can coexist and share common roots. Understanding these dual behavioral tendencies has important implications for corporate governance, executive selection, and organizational inequality.