<p>This study investigates how CEO awards, as salient status-conferring events, generate governance-relevant spillover effects among non-award-winning peer firms. Drawing on social comparison and relative deprivation theories, we conceptualize CEO awards as exogenous status shocks that heighten upward comparison and status-restoration incentives among competing executives. Using a difference-in-differences design and a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2004 to 2022, we find that non-winning firms become significantly more likely to engage in audit opinion shopping following competitors’ CEO award wins. Importantly, this effect is systematically stronger when governance constraints are weaker and when social comparison pressures are more salient. In particular, the spillover effect intensifies when non-winning and award-winning firms are more similar in geographic location and firm size, and when their CEOs share greater personal and status similarity in terms of hometown ties, age proximity and authority asymmetry. Extending the analysis to financial reporting outcomes, we further show that exposure to peer CEO awards is associated with lower reporting quality. Overall, our findings demonstrate that CEO awards function as governance-relevant status shocks that reshape managerial incentives across peer firms, generating unintended spillover effects that compromise financial reporting integrity.</p>