Arun Datta

Arun B. Datta is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University. He received his Ph.D. in Strategic Management from the Red McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin in 2026, where he also earned an M.S. in Management, and he holds a B.A. in Economics and Political Science, with honors, from the University of Michigan.

His research sits at the intersection of strategic management, strategic leadership, and corporate governance. He studies CEO power: how top executives use privileged information, status, political influence, and ownership to shape executive compensation, strategic positioning, firm performance, and acquisition behavior. Founder CEOs are a central setting for this work. He also studies politically connected and other high-profile executives, with particular attention to how the returns to power differ for ethnic minority and immigrant CEOs relative to majority leaders. Current projects examine founder CEO acquisition behavior, whether acquisitions help or undermine sustained superior performance, CEO industry-specific political capital and firm performance, CEO power and employee turnover, cultural fit in acquisitions, and expertise-based power transitions inside top management teams.

To support this research he has built a longitudinal panel of more than 30,000 firm-years that pairs CEO attributes, including Big Five personality traits, founder status, political influence, and industry-specific human capital, with firm actions and outcomes. His work has been presented at the Academy of Management and Strategic Management Society annual meetings, and his coauthored paper with Andrew Henderson appears in the Academy of Management Proceedings. He was a finalist for the Strategic Management Society Strategic Leadership and Governance Interest Group Best Doctoral Student Paper award in 2024.

Before his doctoral studies he worked as a data analyst in supply chain and commodity risk management at Little Caesars and as a category specialist at Walmart eCommerce. He teaches the undergraduate strategic management capstone (MGMT 4513) at Oklahoma State.

Research interests: strategic management; strategic leadership and upper echelons; CEO power, status, and compensation; founder CEOs; mergers and acquisitions; corporate governance and boards of directors; executive diversity, including ethnic minority and immigrant CEOs; corporate political activity and CEO political influence; sustained superior performance; top management teams; CEO personality; panel-data and causal-inference methods for strategy research.