Extending the boundaries of strategic leadership research

Abstract

This special issue was developed to extend the boundaries of strategic leadership research, to help bridge the micro-macro divide regarding theories of strategic leadership, and to bring together theories that have emerged independently. In this introductory editorial, we provide an overview of the research on strategic leadership and emphasize the need for further integration of research from the organizational behavior, industrial and organizational psychology, organizational economics, behavioral strategy, and strategic management fields. We then introduce and summarize the eleven articles we accepted for this special issue by classifying them into two broad themes: (a) Chief executive officer (CEO) characteristics and (b) the dynamics of interactions among the CEO, the top management team, and the board. Finally, we propose recent theoretical and empirical foci for advancing strategic leadership research and offer a research agenda for future research highlighting several important research questions related to extending the dialogue among scholars across the different leadership and strategy domains.