Leadership Quarterly最新文献

We argue and show empirically that constructs and measures of positive leadership styles, such as authentic, ethical, and servant leadership, are not veridical representations of leadership behaviors. Instead, these styles conflate behaviors with subjective evaluations of leaders. Labelling behaviors as, for example, “ethical” means evaluating leadership behaviors on positively valenced terms rather than describing these behaviors. Across four experiments, we show that positive leadership styles are outcomes that depend on non-behavioral, evaluative factors, such as information about a leader’s previous success or value alignment between leaders and followers. More importantly, the measures of these leadership styles create causal illusions by spuriously predicting objective outcomes, even when leader behaviors and other leader-specific factors are kept constant. Furthermore, these measures have predictive properties similar to those of a purely evaluative measure of leadership. In conclusion, our studies cast serious doubts on previous research claiming that positive leadership styles cause positive outcomes. Moreover, positive leadership style research is not only wrong but also practically futile because its constructs and measures are amalgams that do not isolate concrete and learnable behaviors. We call for a radical reorientation of leadership style research and sketch out options for more solid future research.

By exploiting both the unique institutional setting of the Chinese political system and the quasi-experimental features of a massive nationwide rural rustication movement in China during the 1960–1970s, this paper explores the relationship between leaders’ early-life experiences and their policy preferences. Based on a unique panel data set of 318 regional units from 2003 to 2012, we find that those units are associated with more generous rural welfare programs when governed by zhiqing leaders, who experienced rural rustication during their early adulthood. We further find that this association becomes stronger when leaders spent more time in rustication or rusticated in places that were much worse developmentally than their hometowns. These findings remain consistent after applying various robustness checks and accounting for possible selection biases. We interpret these findings as evidence showing that emotional attachment, cognitive sympathy, deservedness justification and self-efficacy accrued through shared life experiences during the sensitive years of adolescence could have lasting effects in configuring leaders’ late policy preferences when they come into power. Our findings lend support to the argument that a leader’s early-life experience provides useful information to predict this leader’s policy styles.

The field of leader development has recently begun to focus more on the role of pre-adult leadership experiences in shaping leader development. However, research has largely neglected to account for children’s and adolescents’ agency in shaping their own leader development, instead focusing on external drivers of such development (e.g., parents, schools). This integrative conceptual article provides a model for leader development from childhood through adolescence, drawing on insights from the cognitive and social child development literature. This model focuses on the reciprocal influences of agency, early leadership experiences, and foundational socio-cognitive skills, including theory of mind, metacognition, self-regulation, and autobiographical reasoning, to foster growth and complexity in leadership skills and mindsets. In addition, the enabling forces that influence the early development and expression of agency, socio-cognitive skills, and leader mindsets are described.

The Leadership Quarterly has helped as a pioneer in accepting Registered Reports (RRs), a submission format where authors provide the introduction, theory section, and methods of their paper for peer review before data collection. Proud but never satisfied, we aim to further boost the number of suitable RR submissions due to our firm belief in their potential for fostering transparent, high-impact research. To inspire authors to explore diverse data collection strategies and methods beyond experiments and survey-based (replication) studies, this work presents four distinct but equally suitable research formats for RRs: meta-analyses, qualitative research, computational approaches, and field intervention studies. Expanding prior research that has explored and promoted general practices and methodological standards for RRs, we offer unique recommendations for preparing an adequate RR proposal along each of these four RR avenues. Additionally, we provide a table of summary resources for authors, reviewers, and editors looking to engage more with RR. In conclusion, we envision a future where other top-tier journals and funding agencies follow The Leadership Quarterly by embracing the incorporation of RRs as a critical component of their strategic approach.

Leaders today must motivate followers to engage in organizational change. Although leader change visions are considered a key motivator, limited research and theory explore how leaders’ use of different change visions influences the extent to which followers are motivated to pursue organizational change goals. Building on issue selling and sensemaking literatures, we offer an expanded typology of leader change visions that more fully represents how leaders can depict the future state of their organization to create a case for change. We further propose a framework that explains how and under what conditions leader change visions motivate followers—individually and collectively—to support change efforts. To explain how followers respond to change initiatives, we highlight the role of regulatory construal fit—the degree to which leader change visions fit with followers’ understanding of the threats or opportunities facing the organization—and regulatory focus fit—the extent to which leader change visions fit with followers’ goal pursuit focus. In addition to contributing to a fuller understanding of the motivational underpinnings of leader change visions, our framework can help leaders tailor their communication to engage followers in the pursuit of organizational transformation goals.

Two increasingly popular domains of research have made great strides explaining leadership via an identity lens (Haslam et al., 2022). These domains focus either on a leader’s own identity or on a leader’s influence in representing and altering the identities of others. Our paper contributes to these areas by highlighting dominant assumptions underlying the literatures and generating counterfactual assumptions in need of systematic exploration. It is important to acknowledge and evaluate assumptions because of the role they play in what we study and how we interpret data. As such, our paper brings existing assumptions to light and generates counterfactuals that are in need of more sustained empirical work. Our work thus sets out to a) expose existing assumptions at the intersection of leadership and identity, b) generate theoretically plausible counterfactual assumptions and c) identify themes tying our counterfactual assumptions together. Together, this paper supports, challenges, and promotes the extension of research applying an identity lens to leadership.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, videoconferencing has become a prominent aspect of many daily work routines. Despite the benefits of this development, scholars have argued that research should consider how trends that emerged during the pandemic may exacerbate pre-existing inequalities. As such, we draw upon evolutionary signaling theory to examine how videoconferencing technology may inadvertently signal one’s social class position, affect judgments of informal leadership and follower performance, and become mechanisms of inequality in the workforce. Through an initial field study (Study 1), our results suggest that people’s home working environments feature various signals that correspond with their social class position. Our subsequent experimental studies (Studies 2 and 3) and meta-analytic summary show that once a window is opened into an employee's home environment, it can lead others to form inferences about their competence, which affects the likelihood that they emerge as a leader and followers’ task performance. Extending evolutionary signaling theory, results show that participants were influenced by the environment-based social class signals even when they knew these were fake, virtual backgrounds. Thus, these subtle environment-based social class signals reflect novel pathways to inequality that likely are relevant as virtual leadership and videoconferencing become part of the “new normal”.

We integrate a person-role fit perspective with recent research on executive personality to explain how and when personality traits reflecting CEOs’ and CFOs’ potential complementary roles as the firm’s visionary leader (extraversion) and corporate conscience (conscientiousness) interact to influence financial leverage. Using a sample of more than 3000 CEO-CFO dyads of S&P 1500 firms from 1997 to 2017, we show that firms with more (less) extraverted CEOs tend to have higher (lower) levels of financial leverage, but that greater CFO conscientiousness buffers this relationship by encouraging more moderate levels of financial leverage at either level of CEO extraversion. We also find that this interaction is less pronounced when the CEO has greater structural power, but more pronounced when the CFO has greater structural power. Our theory and findings extend leadership research by enhancing our understanding of the roles of personality and power in collective leadership settings, and particularly, in encouraging outcomes that better reflect complementarity in the CEO-CFO interface.

Gender diversity on corporate boards continues to present a significant challenge, exacerbated by significant external disruptions such as financial crises or the recent COVID-19 pandemic. These exogenous shocks pressure organizations to reconcile diversity imperatives with more immediate concerns arising from the crises at hand. Employing elements from gender role and institutional theories, we argue that major exogenous shocks will negatively affect (i.e., reduce) gender diversity in corporate boards. Moreover, we propose that female CEOs and the strength of institutional mechanisms (i.e., quotas and corporate governance codes) will moderate (i.e., weaken) the negative effect of these shocks on board gender diversity. We examine these hypotheses in the context of the last global financial crisis (GFC), employing a panel of 10,181 unique firms across 21 countries between 2000 and 2015. We apply a two-way fixed effect difference-in-difference research design, complemented by an extensive battery of additional analyses to ensure robustness. Our results confirm a substantial decline in board gender diversity following the GFC. However, we do not find empirical support for female CEOs or institutional mechanisms in mitigating these diversity reductions. Following these findings, we propose several implications for research and policy.