Matthieu Légeret , Christian Zehnder , Benjamin Tur
{"title":"How good can bad leaders be? The opportunity costs of leader selection","authors":"Matthieu Légeret , Christian Zehnder , Benjamin Tur","doi":"10.1016/j.leaqua.2024.101856","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>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.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48434,"journal":{"name":"Leadership Quarterly","volume":"36 2","pages":"Article 101856"},"PeriodicalIF":9.1000,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Leadership Quarterly","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984324000857","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"MANAGEMENT","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
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.
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.