How good can bad leaders be? The opportunity costs of leader selection

IF 9.1 1区 管理学 Q1 MANAGEMENT Leadership Quarterly Pub Date : 2025-03-01 DOI:10.1016/j.leaqua.2024.101856
Matthieu Légeret , Christian Zehnder , Benjamin Tur
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Abstract

In many organizational settings, the person emerging as the group leader is not the best person for the job. The leadership literature provides several explanations as to why mediocre or even incompetent leaders exist. However, previous work builds on the premise that choosing a leader with limited skills is always a mistake. In this paper, we take a complementary stance and claim that—in some cases—organizations might select underperforming leaders because it is efficient to do so. Determining the leader within a fixed group of individuals is similar to allocating any other limited resource. Leader selection involves a trade-off, in that the benefit a person generates as a leader has to be contrasted with the opportunity cost that arises because the leader is (at least to some extent) no longer available as a follower. We identify cases in which it is optimal not to select the most competent individual as leader. Finally, we discuss how selection procedures need to be designed so that the most appropriate (but not necessarily the most competent) leader is chosen in a given setting.
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坏领导能有多好?领导选择的机会成本
在许多组织环境中,成为团队领导者的人并不是该工作的最佳人选。领导力文献提供了几种解释为什么平庸甚至不称职的领导者存在。然而,之前的研究建立在这样一个前提之上:选择一个技能有限的领导者永远是一个错误。在本文中,我们采取了一种补充的立场,并声称在某些情况下,组织可能会选择表现不佳的领导者,因为这样做是有效的。在一个固定的个人群体中确定领导者类似于分配任何其他有限的资源。领导者的选择涉及到一种权衡,因为一个人作为领导者产生的利益必须与由于领导者(至少在某种程度上)不再作为追随者而产生的机会成本相比较。我们找出不选择最有能力的人担任领导的最佳情况。最后,我们讨论了如何设计选择程序,以便在给定的环境中选择最合适的(但不一定是最有能力的)领导者。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
15.20
自引率
9.30%
发文量
58
期刊介绍: The Leadership Quarterly is a social-science journal dedicated to advancing our understanding of leadership as a phenomenon, how to study it, as well as its practical implications. Leadership Quarterly seeks contributions from various disciplinary perspectives, including psychology broadly defined (i.e., industrial-organizational, social, evolutionary, biological, differential), management (i.e., organizational behavior, strategy, organizational theory), political science, sociology, economics (i.e., personnel, behavioral, labor), anthropology, history, and methodology.Equally desirable are contributions from multidisciplinary perspectives.
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Editorial Board Does it matter how I behave before I step into the leader role? Intrapersonal behavioral shift in temporary leadership role transition and its effect on perceived leadership effectiveness How good can bad leaders be? The opportunity costs of leader selection The choice of control variables in empirical management research: How causal diagrams can inform the decision Female CEO selection: Does the glass cliff exist?
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