Leadership Quarterly最新文献

The article systematically explores exogenous shocks in leadership and management research. It introduces a special issue of The Leadership Quarterly emphasizing how naturally occurring events like financial crises, pandemics, and regulatory changes can be used for empirical research. Then, it reviews various conceptualizations and ways of integrating exogenous shocks into empirical strategies. Finally, it categorizes exogenous shocks based on their extent, timescale, and granularity of intervention, highlighting challenges in causal identification.

Whereas the scarring effects of unemployment on future income, health and well-being are well-documented, little is known about its potential role in future leadership emergence and development. Using data from two cohorts of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY79 and NLSY97) and drawing from life course theory, we examine the role of employment gaps in emerging adulthood on leadership role occupancy in middle adulthood. Based on a combined sample of 9,915 respondents (NLSY79 N = 5,551; NLSY97 N = 4,567), we find strong and robust support for significant scarring effects of early-career unemployment on individuals’ future chances to occupy leadership positions in work settings. We further examine the moderating role of early life disadvantage (operationalized as family socio-economic status and childhood delinquency) and sex. Based on our main and supplementary analyses, we find some but weak support for these interaction effects. Our results based on complete case analyses support the role of early life disadvantage, showing that individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds experience stronger negative effects on leader role occupancy due to employment gaps in emerging adulthood. They further support the moderating role of sex, showing women to experience more adverse effects. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

We use a laboratory experiment to study how leaders affect workers’ productivity across economic incentive contexts. In four-person groups, three group members work on a production task, with a fourth member potentially serving as a leader. We vary the economic context by changing how worker pay is determined as a function of worker outputs, comparing Revenue Sharing, Weak Link or Tournament incentives while holding constant the activity performed by workers and the incentives for leaders. A second treatment varies whether groups have Active Leaders who can exert influence through messages to workers or Passive Supervisors who exert no influence. The average effect of having an Active Leader on group output is large only under Weak Link incentives. Across all incentive contexts, we find a positive correlation between the productivity increase in output produced by an Active Leader and independent ratings of leader quality based on measures from leadership research. The nature of leaders’ communication varies across incentive contexts, with comparisons between workers most common under Tournament incentives and messages about group earnings, which speak to social considerations, most common with Weak Link incentives.

Organizational scholars commonly refer to organizations as complex systems unfolding as a function of work processes. Consequently, the direct study of work processes necessitates our attention. However, organizational scholars tend not to study work processes directly. Instead, organizational scholars commonly develop theories about relationships among psychological construct phenomena that indirectly reference people’s affective, behavioral, cognitive, and/or social processes as underlying explanations. Specifically, construct-oriented theories summarize processes in operation across actors, time, and contexts, and thus, provide limited insights into how focal phenomena manifest directly as a function of process operations. Construct theories remain one-step removed from articulating sequences of actions and two-steps removed from describing generative mechanisms responsible for observed actions. By “missing the action,” construct theories offer incomplete explanatory accounts and imprecise interventions. We assert that researchers in organizational science can make progress towards addressing these concerns by directing greater attention to developing computational process theories. We begin by presenting a framework for differentiating theories based on their focus (constructs versus processes) and modality (narrative versus computational). We use the framework to contrast narrative construct theories to computational process theories. We then describe key design principles for developing computational process theories and explain those principles using a leadership example. We use simulated data, from the computational process model we develop, to explicitly demonstrate the differences between construct and process thinking. We then discuss how computational process theories advance theory development. We conclude with a discussion of the long-term benefits of computational process theories for organizational science.

Research transparency is critical for credible and trustworthy theory and subsequent practices and policymaking. However, checking for transparency is a laborious and time-consuming task. To facilitate this process, we introduce the Research Transparency Index (RTI v. 1.0). The program, available at https://www.hermanaguinis.com, enables users to assess the level of transparency in both unpublished and published manuscripts. RTI provides feedback on the transparency of manuscripts describing quantitative research across key research stages: theory, design, measurement, data analysis, and reporting of results. RTI (a) assists authors in enhancing the transparency of their manuscripts before submitting them to journals and conferences, (b) provides students with guidelines to improve their understanding of research transparency, and (c) provides reviewers and journal editors with a tool to assess manuscripts and offer developmental feedback to authors. RTI saves authors, students, reviewers, and editors time by providing an automated assessment of transparency criteria, which can be updated in the future, given that we make the Python code available. Also, it promotes a culture of transparency, fostering trust and credibility in the scholarly community and among users of the knowledge we produce (e.g., organization and policy decision-makers).

Executive succession in conjunction with a gender shift is a key factor for enhancing gender diversity in senior management positions. Although an extensive strategic leadership literature has examined CEO turnover and succession, research is lacking on the succession of top management team (TMT) members or non-CEO executives at the individual level. By focusing on a specific executive position—the chief human resources officer (CHRO)—this study examines how executive succession in conjunction with a gender shift occurs. Although women are underrepresented in TMTs, we observe an increase in the number of women appointed to the role of CHRO. By utilizing social role and social categorization theories, we describe the dynamics of the gender shift in the CHRO position. We find that CHRO succession with a gender shift is not prevalent and that male-to-male or female-to-female successions are more common. However, our results suggest that CEOs’ board positions in a firm with a female CHRO and the industry-level diffusion of female CHROs tend to be negatively associated with male-to-male CHRO successions. Our results highlight how such factors may mitigate the effect of social role perceptions.

Is the tendency to associate leadership effectiveness with a certain physical appearance universal, or is it a byproduct of electoral democracy? This paper reports the first paired-photo study of leaders in a nondemocracy. We first demonstrate that some basic findings of appearance-based leadership scholarship can be generalized to China. Chinese subjects can identify local politicians from their faces with above-chance accuracy. The faces of local political leaders are considered to be more competent, more trustworthy, and more electable than local nonpolitical leaders. We also push further our understanding of the political effects of the physical appearance of public officials by showing that Chinese politicians seem to be able to command obedience when subjects have the option to individually or collectively oppose an unfavorable arrangement. Overall, our evidence seems to suggest that there is a “prototype leader look” that potentially affects authoritarian politics.

Does loneliness matter for leadership? Recent years saw an increase in academic literature trying to answer this question. To evaluate if existing research could support theory and practice of the leader loneliness phenomenon, we reviewed the literature across levels of analysis and research paradigms, including 71 empirical articles. We identified four major conceptual and methodological limitations. First, the conceptual representation of leader loneliness is unclear and often conflates with general loneliness. Therefore, leadership-specific nomological networks are missing in theoretical conceptualizations. Second, the quality of some empirical findings is insufficient to support policy implications based on different research paradigms and levels of analysis have led to some inconsistent and unreconciled conclusions. Specifically, we could identify only two quantitative and three qualitative articles with policy implications. Third, the measurement of leader loneliness is often imprecise: some items are confounded with extroversion-introversion; some others measure the antecedents of loneliness. Fourth, the methodological concerns in prior work hinder the interpretation of many available findings. Specifically, some quantitative studies incur endogeneity issues, lack realism or costly outcomes in laboratory studies, whereas a number of qualitative studies involve research design issues and lack counterfactuals in theorizing. To contribute to better research practices on this timely topic, we offer suggestions for a better definition, improvement areas in measurement, statistical analysis to avoid endogeneity issues, and trustworthy qualitative research.

This article studies the importance of entertainment TV for the selection of political leaders in the context of an important case study: Donald Trump's win in the 2016 presidential election and his previous role as host of the popular TV show “The Apprentice.” We find a positive correlation between TV ratings of The Apprentice and the county-level Republican vote share in 2016, but this correlation vanishes once we control for pre-existing voting and NBC viewership patterns. This null result is robust to different model specifications, measures of exposure to The Apprentice, and an extensive investigation of heterogeneous effects. Viewership of The Apprentice is also unrelated to Congressional election results, as well as support for Trump in survey data and the Republican primaries. These findings highlight the context-dependent importance of television for political leadership.

Considerable progress has been made in the field of leadership in recent years. However, we argue that this is undermined by a strong residual commitment to an older set of ideas which have been repeatedly debunked but which nevertheless resolutely refuse to die. These, we term zombie leadership. Zombie leadership lives on not because it has empirical support but because it flatters and appeals to elites, to the leadership industrial complex that supports them, and also to the anxieties of ordinary people in a world seemingly beyond their control. It is propagated in everyday discourse surrounding leadership but also by the media, popular books, consultants, HR practices, policy makers, and academics who are adept at catering to the tastes of the powerful and telling them what they like to hear. This review paper outlines eight core claims (axioms) of zombie leadership. As well as isolating the problematic metatheory which holds these ideas together, we reflect on ways in which they might finally be laid to rest.