Dive Brief:

• 24/7 Wall St., using employee ratings at career site Glassdoor, found that employees frown at a CEO who slams the company in public, leads the company poorly, and yet receives steep compensation.

• Many of the CEOs listed by 24/7 Wall Street, a financial news and opinion site, lead retail companies, including GameStop’s J. Paul Raines, Abercrombie & Fitch’s Mike Jeffries, Forever 21’s Do Won Chang, Dillard’s Bill Dillard II, and Sears and Kmart’s Edward S. Lampert.

• 24/7 looked at the 225 companies with at least 500 reviews at Glassdoor and identified nine CEOs with the least favorable reviews of 40% or worse. Information about employee wages were from Glassdoor, and 24/7 Wall Street also reviewed financial statements from the companies filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the companies’ own financial statements, and in the case of privately held companies, information from Forbes magazine.

Dive Insight:

This study shows that, while many retail employees’ experience is at the store level, CEO behavior trickles down to affect them as well. By contrast, CEOs who gain higher rates of approval from employees tend to be good at “clearly communicating their vision, including being transparent about where the company is going, how they’re going to get there, and how each employee plays a vital role in this,” according to Glassdoor spokesperson Scott Dobroski. The CEOs named here may quibble with this — Glassdoor famously gets its information from anonymous posts from employees after all — but it’s potentially a useful measure of the general well-being and direction of a retail company.