The recent resignation of Pfizer's 55-year-old CEO Jeffrey Kindler was widely reported as being the result of too much stress. According to the Wall Street Journal story,
The Pfizer Inc. board was worried about how Chairman and Chief Executive Jeffrey Kindler was handling the stress of his job. He and company directors had begun looking for an inside executive to share the burden of running the world's largest drug company when Mr. Kindler suddenly decided to retire, according to a person familiar with the situation.Certainly Kindler had his hands full at Pfizer. According to the Wall Street Journal, Pfizer's stock has sunk, and numerous R&D failures were part of the pressure. Kindler became "increasingly frazzled" to the point where his wife urged him to resign. The report goes on to say Kindler put in extraordinary personal effort, had looked for an executive to share the role, but ultimately had just "had enough," according to the article.
Pfizer is a large, complex company, but certainly other CEOs have faced similar challenges. What is it that makes the difference in how one person handles stress versus another?
While we don't have any information other than news reports about the circumstances surrounding Kindler's resignation, our work suggests a few things that may have been behind it. We'll look at two of them: personality and motivation.
There is a personality trait related to the experience of stress, called emotional stability. For those familiar with the Hogan Personality Inventory (pdf), we refer to this tendency as Adjustment. We know from research that successful executives are typically higher, rather than lower, on this scale. On the high extreme you have the stereotype of the test pilot—someone who doesn't appear to have an emotional reaction even to extreme, real, physical danger. But being too high can also cause problems. When this strength is taken to a fault, you can have a confident but arrogant person who won't listen to feedback.
On the low side are people who are passionate and appear enthusiastic and energetic. No doubt this was something those choosing Kindler as CEO were attracted to, someone with drive and a sort of impatience for making things happen. But people low in Adjustment are prone to reacting emotionally to all sorts of situations around them. Some show it openly, some feel it only internally, but most experience both. In fact, the WSJ article refers to a typical downside of a low-scoring person. Kindler apparently would have an emotional outburst during a meeting, and then an hour later be on the phone apologizing. People scoring low in adjustment are hyper aware, sometimes to the point of paranoia, about how they must be coming across to others.
It's a difficult balance finding the right executive personality for the job and its challenges at a given point in time. This story highlights a likely mismatch between the realities of a challenging assignment and the downside of emotional sensitivity, to the point of performance failure. According to reports, Pfizer's board was stressed by the situation as well, since they accepted the resignation immediately. Under the circumstances it was probably the best outcome for all involved.
